Capability
Boulder · New Mexico · United Kingdom
Capabilities / Rail monitoring
Rail monitoring
Inertial and gyroscopic sensing applied to rail infrastructure monitoring.
The problem
Why this is hard
Track geometry moves. Ground settles, ballast migrates, temperature works on rail all year, and the deviations that matter are small long before they are visible. Networks manage this with dedicated measurement vehicles, which are accurate, scarce and therefore infrequent: a fault that appears the week after a run is discovered by the traffic rather than by the survey. The gap is not measurement accuracy. It is how often anybody gets to measure.
The answer
What the sensor does
Inertial and gyroscopic sensing records what the vehicle actually did — how it rolled, yawed and displaced along a length of track — and track geometry can be reconstructed from that record. Quantum-grade inertial parts hold their calibration instead of wandering, which is what allows the same measurement to be taken from equipment already running on the network rather than from a vehicle sent out to take it. Frequent, ordinary measurement beats occasional, exceptional measurement.
Applications
Example applications
IMU and gyro sensing
Track geometry reconstructed from the motion of a vehicle already on the network, instead of from a scheduled survey run.