An Integrated Robotic System for Autonomous Brake Bleeding in Rail Yards

Current operations in rail yards are dangerous and limited by the operational capabilities of humans being able to perform safely in harsh conditions while maintain high productivity. Such issues call out the need for robust and capable autonomous systems. In this paper, we outline one such autonomous solution for the railroad domain, capable of performing the brake bleeding inspection task in a hump yard. Towards that, we integrated a large form factor mobile robot (the Clearpath Grizzly) with an industrial manipulator arm (Yasakawa Motoman SIA20F) to effectively detect, identify and subsequently manipulate the brake lever under harsh outdoor environments. In this paper, we focus on the system design and the core algorithms necessary for reliable and repeatable system execution. To test our developed solution, we performed extensive field tests in a fully operational rail yard with randomly picked rail cars under day and night-time conditions. The results from the testing are promising and validate the feasibility of deploying an autonomous brake bleeding solution for railyards.