ARGO: Autonomous inspection of RollinG stOcks

In the field of the condition based maintenance, the ARGO robot is a railway inspection platform designed to move under the trains, both on standard and elevated tracks, in order to collect high quality visual data of critical components. Train inspection is usually performed by human personnel in dedicated facilities, equipped with inspection pits. The peculiar ability of ARGO to operate on conventional railway tracks extends the inspection capabilities outside the conventional maintenance plants, with the potential to significantly change costs, time and frequency of the inspections. The proposed system can both perform autonomous inspection or be remotely teleoperated by using the operator control interface, including software functionalities to store and generate the final inspection report. The system has been already evaluated in two different train inspection facilities, and also operated directly by on-field inspection personnel.