Review on Various Communication Mechanism for Railway Patrol Using UAV

摘要

Rail monitoring is an important task in railway patrol and maintenance which is periodically required. Usually, a trained human operator is needed for rail monitoring by walking along the railway track and searching for obstacles or anomalies on the track. Many times this monitoring is inadequate and causes major accidents due to improper communication and lack of objectivity. This instructs the development of an automated monitoring system to continuously monitor the railway tracks using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) which is one of the fastest growing technologies that can be used for collecting trespasser and obstacle details that causes accidents. In order to efficiently and effectively attain their functions and complete the task, UAV should communicate with Railway Control Station (RCS). This paper offers an overview of UAV services and functions that are involved in the design of UAV-based railway patrol communication system. UAV can be used for monitoring the railway track in which it collects aerial images of the rail tracks after that the collected images are processed in on-board and send the result to RCS. In addition, that the detailed analysis of networking architectures and protocols are discussed for connecting UAVs to RCS through satellite and cell phone network.