About ARIC GmbH

Recent Project: SAMIRA - Shunting Assistant & Monitoring Interface for Autonomous Rail Application

This project is being funded by the national NRW Ziel2 programme and co-funded by the European Commission.
The SAMIRA project has recently started and will enable the digitalisation of shunting areas, reduce necessary resources and deliver the basic features for autonomous railway applications.
A system which will provide all necessary modules for shunting of large freight trains by one train driver on the locomotive and without any shunting assistance. For this task a sensor module will be developed which can be placed at the far end of the freight train. It provides a camera signal with augmented reality features to the train driver. This signal will be transmitted via a W-LAN-Mesh-Network to an HMI device in the locomotive. ARIC develops a high accuracy, dynamically positioning solution based on sensor fusion of GNSS, IMU and other sensors. In addition, ARIC will develop a radar-based collision detection and security algorithms for the entire system.

New Project: Drones4Safety

In addition, our new EU-H2020-funded project Drones4Safety, which involves the inspection of bridges and railway lines by using a swarm of drones, was just launched on June 1. Further information can be found in this presentation:

ARIC History

ARICs history goes back to 2005, when it was initiated as division of AGIT mbH (Aachener Gesellschaft for Innovation and Technology Transfer), the non-profit regional development agency for the Technology Region Aachen. Due to re-structuring of AGIT in 2016, ARIC GmbH has been founded as legal entity as a spin-off from AGIT. Thus, all gained knowledge and experiences from the beginning in 2005 are still available with the enterprise. This includes the access to the GNSS/Galileo testbeds for automotive and rail applications as well as the use of the highly precise geodetic reference field REDUS for dynamical testing of positioning sensors and GNSS receivers.

Within the project Galileo above, two terrestrial test beds have been installed to allow for testing of Galileo-based systems and applications for road (automotive) and railway. These facilities have been set up with public funding and can be used by anybody free of discrimination. ARIC operates the Galileo Application Center Rail & Road and successfully participated in various EU projects such as DETECTOR, STRIKE3 or Galil-EU Large Field Demonstrator, which focused on extending railGATE with a high precision dynamic calibration site. There, receivers which are mounted on a gang car can be positioned with cm precision, to analyse their dynamic behaviour and accuracy. These facilities can be provided by ARIC for the benefit of further projects, too. ARICs office is located directly within the railGATE-/GNSS Dynamic Calibration-facility.

Currently ARICs website is entirely under new construction. You can download an overview on ARICs portfolio as well as the available infrastructure for development, testing and validation by following this link:

SatNav / GNSS Testbeds w/ GALILEO pseudolites

There two Galileo test beds (railGATE and automotiveGATE) have been created to be able to use real Galileo signals for research, development, and testing, already before Galileos initial operation capability (IOC) has been reached in December 2016. In both fields, Galileo antennas which were installed on top of high poles, are transmitting physical Galileosignals which allows dynamic testing and validation of positioning systems, either based on pure GNSS technology or being designed on multi-sensor fusion, in their origin vehicles applications.

Galil-EU / REDUS: high precision geodetic field for dynamic GNSS analysis

This project was funded by the EU's CIP program.
To validate and guarantee the accuracy of the new solutions, the railGATE has been used to integrate a test and validation environment for geodetic and high-accuracy products where accuracy of positioning becomes measurable. An appropriate part of the rail tracks has been selected to set up a measurement- and calibration course in order to conduct dynamic investigations on satellite navigation systems. This accurately surveyed, 3D quasi-invariant-in-space system is forming the basic structure for manifold investigations and applications as accuracy, availability, reliability and many other criteria important for modern hard- and software-development. Thus position measurements can be done dynamically by using a moving platform vehicle where the device under test (DUT) can even get tested under acceleration conditions.

Contact ARIC / Automotive and Rail Innovation Center

Martin Pölöskey
Friedrich-List-Allee 11
D-41844 Wegberg-Wildenrath
Germany
Tel: +49-2432-9337611
Mobil:+49-1732730440
Email:martin.poloskey@aric-research.de