William W. Hay Railroad Engineering Seminar

Railroads, researchers, government laboratories, and industry leaders are using sensors, field deployments, algorithms, and signal processing to assist and prioritize decisions associated with operations. Railroad field inspections and data collection in real-time can assist to save costs, increase safety, and to inform decision prioritization. A new framework of decisions can be generated with the collection of data with near-real time interface with engineers in the field. This presentation summarizes new work on human decisions exploring the concept of human-machine-data interfaces associated with structural dynamics and damage in the context of railroad infrastructure. The interfaces between engineers and infrastructure/dynamics are achieved with Augmented Reality (AR). The presentation summarizes work in human-in-the-loop with application on near real-time computer vision, robot enabled access to structural inspections, and a new infrastructure maintenance paradigm centered in augmenting the capabilities of engineers and managers in the field. Future work includes control of inspectors using human factors collected during inspections.