LiDAR Solutions in Railway Freight Inspection

LiDAR Solutions in Railway Freight Inspection

Railway freight transport is different from railway passenger transport. It has the characteristics of large transport volume, high speed, low cost, and little limit to climatic conditions.It is often used in the transport of living goods, steel, coal, farm produce,medicines and other goods related to people's basic livelihood.

Railway freight transport is full of uncertainty during the transportation process due to the large volume of materials, transport route, railway condition and freight loading reinforcement scheme. Any abnormal factor may endanger the safety of railway traffic and even cause serious accidents. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the status of railway freight transport process through a series of detection technology.

The typical railway freight detection system is based on the logical structure of "perception (sensing) + judgment (decision) + alarm + human control". At the perception layer, by deploying the main sensors and scanning cameras at freight inspection stations, using the high-definition images formed by line scan technology, assisting human monitoring and detecting if there are foreign objects and freight trains are over-limit and other abnormal situations. However, the line scan camera cannot measure distance and acquire detailed data, and it's easily affected by ambient light, and has limitations to night work. Low accuracy of the sensor data causes a high false alarm rate. As a result, the typical railway freight detection solution is lack of reliability and intelligence.

As a new type of sensor, LiDAR has the functions of accurate time detection, accurate spatial detection and ultra-long distance measurement. Due to its high-resolution measuring, it can realize applications such as ranging, speed detection and tracking. It has been widely used in railway transit, autonomous driving, vehicle cooperative infrastructure (V2X), airport docking, shipping and industrial IoT sensing, etc.

Benewake Horn X2 PRO LiDAR is a complementary to typical camera solution due to its good performance in distance ranging and speed detection and stable working day and night. Combination with LiDAR and camera not only increases accuracy and intelligence of freight inspection, but also reduces the loss of manual repeated detection, which further improves the safety of freight trains.

Benewake is one of the top high-tech companies in China to reasearch and develop Lidars independently. We are digging into fields of ITS, especially in multiple complex scenarios in the railway transit industry, improving the automation, safety and intelligence of railway transport.

In 2020, based on the particularity of the rail transit scenarios, we designed a new 3D LiDAR Horn-RT, which is mainly used for the field of rail transit. In 2021, Benewake LiDAR was installed on Shenzhen Metro Line 16 to help fully automatic driving. This is the first LiDAR front installation in subway project in China. In 2022, Benewake LiDAR solution helped fully automatic driving of Beijing Metro Line 11 (Winter Olympic Branch Line).

This year, we have launched several railway freight inspection project in multiple railway lines in China. Benewake provided professional railway freight inspection LiDAR solutions in Xining, Lhasa and Chongqing. By the combination with camera and LiDAR, high-definition sensing images are obtained at the basic sensing layer. With the high refresh rate of 600Hz, measurement accuracy ≤±2cm, stable output distance, spatial two-dimensional coordinate data and other performance and reliability advantages, Benewake Horn-X LiDAR achieves railway freight over-limit and foreign object detection, helping a safer and more stable train transport.