Service Robot for Indian Railway Tracks at Platforms: Feasibility, Kinematics, Dynamics and Trajectory planning

This paper presents kinematics, dynamics and trajectory planning of robot for cleaning the surface below the railway tracks at a platform. The existing cleaning process on the tracks at Indian railway platform is manual, which is tedious particularly, when the frequency of the trains is very high. The end-effector of the manipulator is a nozzle to throw water as cleaning medium. In the first part of the paper, properties of the service robot are stated and some similarities and differences between the service robots and industrial robots are explained. The second part deals with the feasibility of the proposed system. The third part deals with the kinematics and dynamics of the robot manipulator, along with proposed trajectory. In this paper, we have proposed suitable trajectory planning and scheduling algorithm for efficient cleaning and to minimize the wastage of water also