Hampton, VA, August 27, 2020: Ardenna announced today the general availability of Rail-Inspector, its cloud-based software that accurately analyzes and processes imagery captured during drone surveys. Rail-Inspector identifies and measures railway features, classifying anomalies and determining the health of railway features, while reporting on areas of relevant change to railroad decision makers. Some of the track features identified include ties and their condition, joint bars, fasteners, frogs and switches. Track features measured include rail gage and gaps, tie distance and spacing, tie angle, percent ballast covering ties, and more.

Drone surveys using Rail Inspector remove the need for possessions and line blocks, ensuring significant cost savings. The breadth of results being reported from an individual drone survey augments a typical human inspection and simultaneously provides a level of insight into the track health only available using costlier solutions. Track owners benefit from a reduction in maintenance downtime, increased operational efficiency, and improved worker and railroad safety — all while providing a visual and digital record of rail assets. Once multiple drone surveys have been performed, track health trends can be identified, leading to predictive track maintenance.

“Any time an inspector is on the track, there is a safety risk. That safety risk, combined with the amount of track typically inspected, limits the inspector’s focus to identifying the immediate and near-term concerns, essentially operating in a reactive mode”, said David M. Patterson, Business Development Director for Ardenna. “Like a human inspector, a subset of the information reported by Rail-Inspector identifies immediate/near-term problems, augmenting a human’s inspection. However, unlike the traditional inspection, Rail-Inspector generates a comprehensive dataset, representing details associated with the track’s current health that would be impractical for a human inspector to record. By watching these track details evolve over time, trends can be identified, enabling maintenance to be scheduled and performed proactively before human or rail safety is impacted.”

Track imagery, successfully processed by Rail Inspector, has been collected from numerous drone platforms (DJI Phantom 4, DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise, DJI M600 and Latitude HQ-60) and camera payloads (12 MP, 20 MP, 29 MP, 60 MP and 100 MP). Rail Inspector has also demonstrated the ability to process imagery captured from a manned aircraft and a helicopter. A future configuration will have the imagery captured from an operational rail vehicle.