Ardenna Rail-Inspector® Now Available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace
Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to Ardenna Rail-Inspector to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and agility of Azure to drive application development and shape business strategies.
Hampton, VA, June 15, 2021: Ardenna (www.ardenna.com), a leader in image processing and machine learning software that automatically extracts objective and quantitative data from industrial inspection imagery, today announced the availability of Ardenna Rail-Inspector in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure. Ardenna customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management. Customers will also be able to benefit from Rail-Inspector’s reduction in maintenance downtime, increased operational efficiency and improved worker and railroad safety – all while providing a comprehensive visual and digital record of the track condition.
Ardenna’s Rail-Inspector is a SaaS offering, only available on Azure.
“Through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, Rail-Inspector will have a broader exposure to domestic and international railroad track asset owners,” said David M. Patterson, Business Development Director for Ardenna.
“Through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers around the world can easily find, buy, and deploy partner solutions they can trust, all certified and optimized to run on Azure,” said Jake Zborowski, General Manager, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp. “We’re happy to welcome Ardenna Rail-Inspector to the growing Azure Marketplace ecosystem.”
The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.
Ardenna introduces Rail-Inspector™,
the most comprehensive
inspection and track health software for railroads and industrial rail asset owners
Automatically generates comprehensive, objective and quantifiable track condition data from aerial imagery,
enabling data-driven maintenance decisions that reduce costs and improve worker and railroad safety.
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.