On March 28, the intelligent maintenance robot platform for railway catenary, initiated and coordinated by Shuohuang Railway, was launched for trial operation in Suning County, Hebei Province. The platform marks the first closed-loop intelligent operation and maintenance equipment of China’s electrified railway catenary throughout the whole chain, featuring “intelligent diagnosis—autonomous decision-making—precision operation”, which fills the gaps in the field of robot operation and maintenance of domestic electrified railway catenary, thus demonstrating great significance of promoting China’s heavy-haul railway operation and maintenance mode towards intelligent and digital development.

As the “energy supply artery” of the electric locomotive, the catenary system bears the key function of continuous power supply for the train, with its status directly affecting the safety of railway transportation. Traditional manual maintenance has long faced the “three high” problems—high risk of overhead operation, high blind spot of manual inspection, and high cost due to reliance on experience. With six-degree of freedom robot group as the core, the newly launched intelligent maintenance robot platform integrates 3D digital twin, intelligent identification, control AI and other key technologies, to build the catenary intelligent maintenance system characterized by “independent identification of defects, intelligent development of maintenance strategy, millimeter-level precision maintenance”.

The robot platform’s three major technological breakthroughs lead industrial transformation. First, the precision intelligent diagnosis integrates AI algorithms with high-precision visual sensors to increase typical defect recognition accuracy to more than 90%, enabling millimeter-level positioning of defects. In addition, it realizes autonomous operation with less manpower, pioneering cooperative control technology of multi-mechanical arms, which can autonomously complete key operations including bolt fastening, stagger value adjustment, (catenary) height calibration, replacing 40% of manual operation and maintenance, reducing the number of single operation personnel from 10 to 5, and lowering the labor intensity of frontline operation personnel by more than 30%. Furthermore, intelligent safety control, and visual monitoring & digital twin systems work to build real-time three-dimensional operation scenarios to avoid the visual blind spot of the traditional manual maintenance, thus reducing the risk of falling from height, arc burns and other safety accidents by 90%.

The project was jointly organized by Shuohuang Railway and five units to form an integrated research team featuring “industry-academia-research” cooperation to carry out joint research on difficult technologies, and innovatively introduced digital intelligence technology into catenary operation and maintenance, which took three years to overcome six core technologies including “millimeter alignment of overhead bolts” and “dynamic obstacle avoidance of multiple fixtures”, and constructed a complete technical system covering perception, decision-making and execution. During the trial operation of the platform, the Shuohuang Railway completed catenary maintenance operations 12 times, with single operation efficiency doubling, and maintenance qualification rate reaching 100%.

The project leader of the Shuohuang Railway noted that they will deepen the “robot +” application scenarios in the following plan, continue to improve extended functions, including unmanned traction locomotive linkage, intelligent on-site maintenance of support equipment, dismantling the old catenary equipment for the new, to achieve the multi-scenario application of the intelligent maintenance robot platform of the catenary to help build the intelligent operation and maintenance industry cluster of electrified railway.