UK: East Midlands Railway is working with Bristol-based technology firm One Big Circle on a project to remove the need for manual trackside inspections of diesel multiple-units.
The DepotMATE project will use One Big Circle’s Automated Intelligent Video Review cloud-based platform along with high-resolution line scanning, thermal imaging, video cameras and acoustic sensors to remotely assess the condition of Class 170 and Class 158 DMUs as they enter and leaves the depot.
This aims to avoid the need for time-consuming and potentially dangerous trackside manual inspection.
‘We are looking forward to analysing the results of the pilot to understand if the technology could be adopted on a wider scale’, said EMR’s Head of Engineering Mark Coney.
The project is being funded under the Department for Transport and Innovate UK’s First of a Kind scheme.
One Big Circle co-founder Emily Kent said this ’is a fantastic example of how the First of a Kind competition enables SMEs to accelerate initial concepts into cross-industry collaborations’.
