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Using GPS To Prevent Train Crashes In India
dave420 writes "The BBC has an article outlining plans in India to use GPS technology to alert train drivers of obstructions on the tracks, automatically stopping the train if the driver fails to take action. This sounds like a good use of cheaply-available technology to provide a safer train network."
I wonder if this technology will evolve into technology to support automobile travel. There have been many attempts to develop technologies to allow for automated auto travel from laying copper wire for navigation systems to using object sensors in bumpers. Maybe GPS is the way to go! Of course, the BMW's of the world will get it first!
But now, they can look forward to yoga classes, counselling for work as well as personal problems and air-conditioned rest rooms on long distance trips. While the GPS system drives the train?
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The same reason the UK seems to be having many crashes and derailments. Who could have thought of such a thing.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
I have an idea for improving train safety.
The biggest problem for train safety is that a train is hard to stop. It has so much mass that you can't just suddenly decide to stop it. In a perfect world, you would have some warning before you needed to stop it.
So make a much smaller vehicle that can stop quickly, and have that run out ahead of the train! Call it the "point car". Sensors on the point car would watch for an obstruction on the tracks (such as a stalled truck) and would halt the point car quickly; the train would stop more slowly, but it would have enough warning that it could stop before it reached the point car, let alone the obstruction. Also, you could mount a video camera on the front of the point car, and the engineer driving the train could watch a live video feed. A wireless radio link is probably the best way for the point car and the train to communicate.
I'm sure the biggest problem with my idea is that it would cost too much. The point car would need fuel of some sort, and would itself be an expensive piece of equipment, and you would need one for each train. It would be cool if the point car could be driven by electric motors that somehow parasite power off the train, but I don't think any sort of power extension cord would be very practical.
And of course, if India is only now spending the money to put cushions in for engineers to sit on, they won't be the first ones to try point cars.
I don't know much about train crashes -- what fraction of train crashes are preventable with just GPS, and what fraction are not? If the most common problem is a train hitting another train, then GPS on both trains would help a lot. But GPS won't do much good if a truck stalls across the tracks.
steveha
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mod this parent up!
India's train engineers are notorious for braking fatally at the last minute because of a sacred cow on the tracks. While this may seem stupid to the rest of the word (and probably to the poor cow who merely wishes to die) the Indians are adamant that people should die to protect the cow. Knowing where the cows are seems very important if you value human life.
Well, that sums up my thoughts after reading this article. Huh? GPS is really useful for a lot of things, and railroads use it to track there cars in the rail yard (with the help of radios which broadcast their location) and on the rails. And they can distinguish whether a car is on one track or the other if they have differential GPS set up.
As for collisions, it could help avoid crashes between 2 cars or between 1 car and a known obstruction, if they are using differential GPS to identify the track. Otherwise. I suppose if there's only one track, the railroads could use this info to prevent trains from colliding. Or if a bridge is out, the railroad could use software that gets the GPS info to alert the driver.
However, the article doesn't go into any details at all; maybe they'll just use it to identify conductors of recent accidents, which they could probably do just as well w/o GPS since the dispatchers know where the trains are anyways. Maybe this is just the easiest thing to implement with the GPS technology, and once it's in place, they'll expand. I wish the article had more info though, so I could spare everyone from my idle speculation.
Please read "Trains in Japan". Trains in Japan have been extremely reliable and clean since the 1950s -- almost half a century. In 1960, there was no GPS, no Internet, etc. Yet, the train system in Japan worked fine.
What in Indian culture prevents Indian society from developing into a modern society? Why does Indian society need all this high-tech intervention in order to make it just barely livable, yet Japan has been an adequately livable society since the late 1960s?
Amidst the bombard of vendors during the wait, at least I know now where to obtain a false passport.
A search for "GPS jammer" can be interesting for the bored.
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Yes of course it has to be made more accurate, and that's just what this professor at UCR's, Department of Electrical Engineering is working on. To quote what he says about it:
Global Positioning Systems: Accurate vehicle control requires reliable, accurate, high rate vehicle state information. We have developed and demonstrated a differential GPS/INS system to provide full six degree of freedom vehicle state information. Using GPS carrier phase and/or magnetometer measurements, we currently attain 2.5 cm. std. horizontal position accuracy. The INS provides the estimates at a higher rate (>150Hz) than the GPS itself is capable of providing. In addition, the INS maintains the vehicle state during brief periods of loss of GPS signal.
He also has some mpeg demo's available and also some reports (if you are really interested) on his home page (linked above).
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A friend of mine's father works for the railroad here in the US. High level position that oversee's all of the traffic throughout the east.
As I understand it, they use all sorts of radio networks and GPS systems to track where all the trains and cars are. They have advanced enough tracking that they know what locamotives are where, how many cars are hooked up to it, which track its on, and where its going.
While technology isn't going to stop someone from hitting a boulder, it can get information around and see who is near the area and avoid as much damage as possible. It is foolish to think we can protect ourselves from everything, but a step in the right direction is progress none the less.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin