Railway Track Irregularity Measuring by GNSS/INS Integration

Q. Chen, Q. Zhang, Y. Cheng

Abstract:	Railway track irregularity measuring is a task of fundamental importance and critical to guarantee operating safety and to arrange proper maintenance, particularly for the high-speed lines. Conventional light-weight track survey trolley combined with high-precision survey equipment, such as motorized total station, can achieve high accuracy but is not efficient enough for the track irregularity measuring. In this paper, we propose to use GNSS/INS integrated technique to measure the railway track irregularity. The track irregularity can be detected based on the high-precision relative measurement provided by GNSS/INS system. Key technologies of the integration algorithm aiming at the track irregularity measuring are proposed to improve the performance of the GNSS/INS system. Real track irregularity measuring experiments is conducted to validate the method based on GNSS/INS integration. The results indicate the proposed method based on GNSS/INS show high efficiency compared with conventional method based on total station. The angular measurements of GNSS/INS have fairly good repeatability and can achieve high accuracy of 0.01degree (1 ). Track irregularities identified by the GNSS/INS method are in good agreement with those by the conventional survey equipment (i.e. Amberg GRP1000), which means the track irregularity measurement based on the proposed GNSS/INS method can achieve high relative accuracy of 1 mm in the kinematic mode. This accuracy can meet the requirements of the track irregularity measurement for high speed line.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013) September 16 - 20, 2013 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	2180 - 2194
Cite this article:	Updated citation: Published in NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation
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