Instantaneous position and pose measurements of moving vehicles with applications to railway infrastructure monitoring

A new method for instantaneous position and pose measurements of fast-moving railway vehicles is proposed to solve the measurement reference problem encountered in applications of kinematical examination on the safety status of railway infrastructures. By utilizing reflection mirror sets installed on the ground, onboard lasers, and onboard imaging and monitoring equipments, this method can measure the position and angular displacements of a moving rail vehicle with respect to the ground reference in real-time, and rectify the onboard measurement reference at specific positions. Integrated with an inertial navigation system, this method can obtain a continuous measurement reference with bounded errors during the process of kinematical examination. Error analysis, numerical simulations, and experiments show that this method has high accuracy, wide measurement range, simple structure, and good practical values.