Inspecting nuts on Eurotunnel freight trains

In the age of digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, Eurotunnel is building up its diagnostic capabilities for the inspection of rolling stock. This follows on from its development of systems for the predictive maintenance of catenaries (read Eurotunnel Van article).

The maintenance teams contacted R&D Vision to develop a tool to detect the missing nuts on moving freight train pagodas. The inspection is carried out using four 4K cameras synchronised with pulsed lighting.

As it currently stands, two tracks are equipped with this system, and operators perform the analysis using a specific software interface. After several months of operation, and the implementation of a representative image database, the system will be ready to move onto the automatic detection of missing nuts using Artificial Intelligence.

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