TITLE:
Application of UAV Technology in Railway Industry: Innovation, Practice and Performance Evaluation Based on Intelligent Inspection and Emergency Response
AUTHORS:
Junna Shen, Huibing Cheng, Yueyu Guo, Shaohan Zhuo, Aiping He, Jincheng Zhou, Dengheng Zheng
KEYWORDS:
UAV Technology, Railway Industry, Intelligent Inspection, Emergency Response, Performance Evaluation, Machine Vision
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Applied Sciences,
Vol.16 No.4,
April
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: With the rapid development of high-speed railway and heavy-haul railway, the traditional railway operation and maintenance mode faces challenges such as high labor intensity, low inspection efficiency and poor emergency response capability. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, integrated with technologies such as machine vision, 5G communication and satellite positioning, has gradually become an important support for the intelligent transformation of the railway industry. To solve the pain points of traditional railway operation and maintenance, this paper systematically explores the application scenarios, technical paths and performance effects of UAV technology in the railway industry. Based on the real operation data collected from January 2024 to December 2024 in 8 typical railway sections with different line types, operation scales and geographical environments in China, Europe and Southeast Asia, this paper focuses on the application of UAV in railway track inspection, overhead line detection, tunnel defect identification and emergency disposal, and constructs a performance evaluation system from three dimensions: efficiency, cost and safety. The experimental results show that the application of UAV technology can reduce the track inspection time by 68.3% - 75.1%, reduce the operation and maintenance cost by 32.6% - 41.8%, and improve the defect detection accuracy by 23.5% - 31.2% compared with the traditional manual mode. This paper also analyzes the current technical bottlenecks and policy constraints of UAV application in the railway industry, and discusses the research limitations based on the actual application conditions of the 8 cases, and puts forward targeted improvement suggestions. The research results provide a practical technical reference for the large-scale application of UAV technology in the railway industry, and have important theoretical and engineering application value for promoting the high-quality development of intelligent railways.