Dr. Seppo Heikkilä, Lead Robotics Engineer, Squad Lead, Project Manager

Climate change hampered future needs some drastic actions to turn the tide. One way is to improve the availability and attraction of public transportation solutions and to reduce the use of traditional fossil fuel based logistics solutions. Electrified railway operations tick both boxes. Extensive R&D resources have been directed to improve current solutions on the EU level and beyond, so that the future solutions would be not only more environmentally friendly but also safer and more efficient. To achieve the efficiency and safety related objectives, the level of autonomy needs to be raised to reduce the possibility of human error in some critical operations and to increase the maximum usage of the rolling stock. To do that, you need to be able to localize the train and to understand what is happening around, and especially, in front of it. One could say that those two functionalities are absolutely crucial when the railways, as a business, moves constantly towards more eco-efficient way of working.