AgriTech
NIR Grading at 12 Tonnes an Hour on a Receival Belt
Grain Protein Sorting Classifier
12 t/h
continuous grading throughput
250 ms
protein estimate interval on the belt
Rail / Rolling Stock Maintenance
Trackside Pantograph Wear Scanner
Carbon Strip Wear Measured at 80 km/h, Without Taking Trains Out of Service
Rail
Industry
13 months
Duration
4 → 8
TRL
4
Disciplines
Background
An electrified passenger rail operator inspected pantograph carbon strips manually in the depot. A strip worn past limit can dewire and bring down overhead line equipment, closing a corridor for hours, so inspection intervals were set conservatively and strips were routinely replaced with usable material left on them.
The problem
What made it hard.
Measuring a 30 mm carbon strip to sub-millimetre accuracy while it passes overhead at 80 km/h leaves roughly 400 µs of usable exposure per scan line. Daylight, rain, and the arc flash from the contact point all corrupt the image. The trackside enclosure had no mains power beyond a small solar and battery budget, and could not be trackside-cabled back to a depot network.
Approach
What we built.
We built a gantry-mounted line-scan rig with pulsed infrared illumination synchronised to an axle-counter trigger, which freezes the strip profile and rejects both daylight and arc flash by exposure timing rather than filtering. A Jetson AGX Orin reconstructs the strip profile from the scan lines and a small regression model estimates remaining thickness per zone, compensating for pantograph sway using the mounting-horn reference edges. Only the extracted profile and a wear estimate leave the site — about 40 KB per pass instead of gigabytes of imagery — over a 4G link. Wear trends per vehicle accumulate in a depot database that drives replacement scheduling.
Outcome
What it measured.
±0.3 mm
measurement accuracy at line speed
80 km/h
maximum scan speed, no service interruption
23%
improvement in carbon strip utilisation
The scanner measures every pass to ±0.3 mm against depot micrometer readings, so the operator moved from fixed-interval inspection to condition-based replacement. Strip utilisation improved 23% because units are now changed on measured wear rather than schedule, and two dewirement events were pre-empted in the first year when a strip trended to limit between planned inspections.
Our role
Optical and illumination design; trackside enclosure and power; edge reconstruction pipeline; wear model; depot integration.
Technologies
Jetson AGX OrinLine-scan camerasPulsed IR illuminationONNX RuntimePythonPostgreSQLGrafana
Gallery
Inside the build.
Figure 1 — Reconstructed carbon strip profile plotted against the wear limit, with the worn zone highlighted..
Figure 2 — Solar panel, battery box and sealed compute enclosure on the gantry leg..
Figure 3 — Timing diagram.
Figure 4 — Depot dashboard of per-vehicle wear trend lines converging on replacement thresholds..
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