Railway
Group Leader: Dr. rer. nat. Martin Lauer
Railways are a transportation system of the future, especially in times of climate change. With our research at the Institute of Measurement and Control Systems at KIT we support the development of new technologies for autonomous trains and modern train protection systems.
Future trains should independently monitor their environment and detect potential obstacles or dangerous situations. An additional step towards a future railway system is to enable railway vehicles to estimate their position onboard autonomously. This allows to reduce costly infrastructure at the track. In our research we focus on these key technologies.
RAIL-BENCH is the first perception benchmark suite for railways, covering rail detection, object detection, vegetation segmentation, tracking, and visual odometry with curated datasets and public leaderboards.
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Development of sensors to determining velocity and position of rail vehicles using existing infrastructure elements along the railway track.
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We use lidar sensors to detect railway infrastructure, especially turnouts and their branching direction. This topological information enhances train-borne localization accuracy near parallel tracks.
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Development of a sensor fusion framework for accurate railway self-localization integrating GNSS, contactless speed measurements, and digital maps.
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