Importance and Applications of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in Railway Maintenance Sector: A Review <s> RAS in Bridge Maintenance <s> This paper proposes design and control methods for a bridge inspection robot system. A "bridge inspection robot" has been developed with the aim of checking the safety status of a real bridge, gathering accurate data and performing maintenance. The developed robot system is composed of the specially designed car for bridge inspection, the guide rail and the inspection robot. Especially, this paper emphasizes the system integration method to design and control the entire robot system. As a result, this robot has both automatic and manual modes for inspecting a real bridge. In other words, the robot is automatically able to inspect beneath the bridges and manually to inspect them by long-distance user. Also, the users can see the operating conditions of long-distance robot with 3-dimensional graphical user interface. Moreover, the users can feel the operating status of long-distance robot through haptic device. <s> BIB001 </s> Importance and Applications of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in Railway Maintenance Sector: A Review <s> RAS in Bridge Maintenance <s> This paper presents the research on and development of a robotic system for stripping paint and rust from steel bridges, with the ultimate objective of preventing human exposure to hazardous and dangerous debris (containing rust, paint particles, lead and/or asbestos), relieving human workers from labor intensive tasks and reducing costs associated with bridge maintenance. The robot system design, the key research challenges and enabling technologies and system development are discussed in detail. Research results obtained so far and discussions on some key issues are also presented. <s> BIB002 </s> Importance and Applications of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in Railway Maintenance Sector: A Review <s> RAS in Bridge Maintenance <s> Corrosion can cause section loss or cracks in the steel members which is one of the most important causes of deterioration of steel bridges. For some critical components of a steel bridge, it is fatal and could even cause the collapse of the whole bridge. Nowadays the most common approach to steel bridge inspection is visual inspection by inspectors with inspection trucks. This paper mainly presents a climbing robot with magnetic wheels which can move on the surface of steel bridge. Experiment results shows that the climbing robot can move on the steel bridge freely without disrupting traffic to reduce the risks to the inspectors. <s> BIB003
Railway bridge maintenance is labor-intensive and, in most circumstances, technicians need to execute the bulk of tasks in dull, dirty and dangerous environments. Therefore, to relieve human workers from such labour intensive and dangerous tasks, Liu et al. have introduced a robotic system for stripping paint and rust from steel bridges. The proposed system consists of a 6-DOF industrial robot, a moving platform, a sensor package that is equipped with a laser range finder, cameras, and a capacitive sensor network, and a high-performance computer BIB002 . In addition, Wang and Kawamura have designed and developed a semi-autonomous magnetic climbing robot for steel bridge inspection, which can be freely moved without disrupting the traffic. The magnetic wheels of this design not only provide necessary adhesion, but the required magnetic field for inspection. The system is yet to be completed and tested on real bridge inspection task BIB003 . Furthermore, Oh et al. have prototyped a bridge inspection robot, which consists of a specially designed car, a guide rail, and an inspection robot. The proposed system is capable of fully autonomous operation or teleoperation by distant user, which has been successfully tested in laboratory conditions. It is expected to develop the robot to operate in real environments BIB001 .