I'm currently in my final year of university and looking to start into my individual project. I have decided to come with my own concept where I would be using the Arduino Uno inconjunction with a laser scanner such as david 3D scanner to scan a rail-track and somewhat image process to detect any cracks.
My problem is there isn't clear tutorials or source of information where a laser scanner is used.
Another idea I have come across, is using the Arduino with the wireless shield, camera and laser scanner and get the data processed in MATLAB.
Has anyone attempted a smiliar project of nature and could assist me a bit, since I'm lost. BTW, I'm new to arduino
8 bit processor with 2K of RAM and 32K of storage ?
I don't think so unless the Arduino was doing some periphery duty with a much more powerful machine doing the work. Away froim Arduino land, the Atmel 328 processor would typically be used to manage your central heating boiler or burglar alarm.
Arduino is a great platform for low processing power projects but for your project you require more speed as the images will need to be high resolution for detection of cracks.
A computer is best BUT have you looked into the Raspberry Pi platform? Look that up, it is much much more powerful. I have not checked the specifications of it but just an idea.
@compuslave : It's the rails where railway train would travel and we talking about maximum of a 1mm crack. I was hoping for an early detection of cracks on the head of the track essentially.
@MushfiqSarker : Thank you pointing that out for me. I will look into it.
I ask because if they are big enough there may be other, arduino-able, ways to do it. You could detect a 1mm with regular ol ir I bet. You could also think about repurposing a rangefinder maybe??? 1mm is a pretty big crack. Hairline stress fractures are really the ones I would think you want to find. Don't suppose you have an old Xray or mammography machine laying around? Anyway, just some incoherent ramblings of a random internet troll.
Are you envisaging this as something you'd do while traveling along the track? At what speed? It sounds to me like a problem that calls for a substantial video bandwidth and a big processor behind it to do realtime image processing on the video stream.
(Do you know whether visual crack detection is actually the most effective way to detect cracks? I have no idea.)
FarisMahder:
I'm currently in my final year of university and looking to start into my individual project. I have decided to come with my own concept where I would be using the Arduino Uno inconjunction with a laser scanner such as david 3D scanner to scan a rail-track and somewhat image process to detect any cracks.
An Arduino would be suitable for powering up / down a scanner, controlling a pan/zoom/tilt head to a camera, or controlling a small motor that could move your scanner along something like MakerSlide to examine a long section more autonomously.
As others have pointed out it's probably not realistic to get the little CPU of an Arduino to do any kind of optical recognition. My guess is you'll be able to find pattern recognition libraries for Linux and/or Windows so you won't have to roll your own; maybe your needs aren't excessive and you could run the analysis on something like a Raspberry Pi.
Where an Arduino may make sense is joining the above paragraphs. For control of physical things like stepper motors and turning things on and off an Arduino is really easy, and you'll be able to find lots of examples for most things. Connect your Arduino to your PC via USB and your application can control these physical things with simple commands over a serial link; which is defined for just about any programming language you can think of.
