Project Title: Rail-Robots For Railway Tracks Routine Inspection - Novel Re-Configurable Mechanism Design

Project Title: Rail-robots for railway tracks routine inspection – Novel re-
configurable mechanism Design

Project Number IMURA0706
Monash Main Supervisor Professor Sunita Chauhan

Full name, Email
(Name, Email Id, Phone) Sunita.chauhan@monash.edu
Monash Co-supervisor(s) Prof. Ravi Ravitharan
(Name, Email Id, Phone) Ravi.ravitharan@monash.edu
Monash Head of Professor Chris Davies

Chris.davies@monash.edu Full name, email
Dept/Centre (Name,Email)
Monash Department: Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Monash ADRT Professor Emanuele Viterbo Full name, email

(Name,Email) Emanuele.viterbo@monash.edu
IITB Main Supervisor Professor Anirban Guha

Full name, Email
(Name, Email Id, Phone) Email: anirbanguha1@gmail.com
IITB Co-supervisor(s)
(Name, Email Id, Phone)
IITB Head of Dept Professor Suhas S Joshi

Full name, email
(Name, Email, Phone) Email: head.me@iitb.ac.in
IITB Department: Mechanical Engineering
Research Academy Themes:

Highlight which of the Academy’s Theme(s) this project will address?
(Feel free to nominate more than one. For more information, see www.iitbmonash.org)
1. Advanced computational engineering, simulation and manufacture

2. Infrastructure Engineering
3. Clean Energy
4. Water
5. Nanotechnology
6. Biotechnology and Stem Cell Research
7. Humanities and Social Sciences
The research problem
The rapid growth for freight, passenger and heavy haul railway across the world introduces the
challenges of increased costs of upgrading railway infrastructure and increased demand for
enhanced efficiency and performance. Integration of robotics and smart communication
technologies presents opportunities to develop rail into a more commercially sustainable
industry. One of the important rail infrastructure management activities involves regular
inspection of track conditions, which is labour intensive and could be potentially augmented
with robotics.
The proposed project aims to address the above problem by introducing autonomous
inspection of railway tracks using dedicated robotic systems that could ‘walk’ the track instead
of human inspections. Since the terrain/environment for the robots to manoeuvre and interact is
known but highly specialized, unlike the road or factory floor surface, it would require
exploration of novel mechanisms and configurations. Since the railway track network is known,
it comes under structured environment category.
Also, such novel configuration and specified application calls for an inherent
‘intelligence’ using both interoceptive and exteroceptive sensors for self-balancing and
dynamically updating the environmental information. This in turn, requires predictive
assessment based upon efficient communication links between the robot(s) and the
environment (railway tracks, control room, signalling, scheduling and logistics etc.) for
coordination and localization of the robot. Therefore, the aims of this project are to
design, develop and analyze re-configurable base mechanisms based on inspection tasks and
types. A challenging problem to address is optimality and robustness of configurations and
inspection methodologies/techniques: design energy efficient and fault tolerant
techniques for repeated autonomous exploration.
Project aims
The project aims to design, fabricate and validate innovative re-configurable mobile robots that
can be adapted to various inspection tasks (and hence variable sensing suites) in routine
railway inspections.
Expected outcomes
 Design and develop re-configurable mobile robotic mechanisms (wheeled or legged or

hybrid) dedicated to railways structured environment;
 Control strategies for self-balanced manoeuvrability on railway tracks;
 Capability of holding, deploying, dispensing and moving variable payloads and sensing
suites for dedicated inspection tasks.
 Hardware-software integration and validation.
 Publications in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.
How will the project address the Goals of the above Themes?
The project is related to designing, modelling and optimizing novel mechanisms and control
strategies for efficient and fault tolerant exploration for inspection of rail infrastructure.
Capabilities of the system would be investigated by extensive modelling and simulations.
The above mentioned research activities thus fall under the two main themes of the research
academy, viz. Advanced computational engineering, simulation and manufacture and
Infrastructure Engineering
Capabilities and Degrees Required

B.E. or M.Tech in relevant branch of engineering with strong knowledge and aptitude in
mechanism design, mathematical modelling, robotics and control systems.
Potential Collaborators
Potential collaborators have already been identified:
Professor Sunita Chauhan and Mr. Ravi Ravitharan, Monash University and
Profs. Anirban Guha at IITB
Please provide a few key words relating to this project to make it easier for the students to apply.
Mechanism design, robotics, control systems

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Project Title: Rail-robots for railway tracks routine inspection – Novel re-

configurable mechanism Design

Monash Main Supervisor Professor Sunita Chauhan

Monash Head of Professor Chris Davies

Monash ADRT Professor Emanuele Viterbo Full name, email

IITB Main Supervisor Professor Anirban Guha

IITB Head of Dept Professor Suhas S Joshi

IITB Department: Mechanical Engineering

Research Academy Themes:

1. Advanced computational engineering, simulation and manufacture

The research problem

 Design and develop re-configurable mobile robotic mechanisms (wheeled or legged or

Capabilities and Degrees Required

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