Cordel completes key milestone in contract with Angel Trains

Transport-focussed artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Cordel Group announced the successful completion of a key milestone in its contract with rolling stock operator Angel Trains on Thursday.

The AIM-traded company said it had delivered the first key component of the project, a ‘digital twin’ of the entire Paddington-to-Didcot route, which had now been showcased to Network Rail staff.

It described the digital twin as a survey-grade light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, with co-located high-resolution video, aligned to Network Rail's linear reference system.

“Our contract with Angel Trains for Network Rail in the UK has enabled us to realise our vision to install our LiDAR, imagery and locations hardware onto in-service passenger trains,” said Cordel’s UK and Europe business development director, Rebeka Sellick.

“Building on last year's success, we installed a third complete ‘Cordel Wave32’ set on to an additional class 165 train at Great Western Railway's Reading servicing and maintenance depot in February this year, proving that our modular retrofit can easily be rolled out to successive passenger trains.

“Key to Cordel's approach is that the hardware is not an end in itself, but feeds our data pipeline, so we can enrich the machine learning of our AI algorithms to deliver outputs for Network Rail's engineers.”

Sellick explained that with the “no-touch data capture” now delivering up to 110GB per sensor set per day, depending on the train's timetable, Cordel was tailoring its AI to deliver further insights for Network Rail, where engineers had access to the Cordel Viewer to explore the dataset of LiDAR and imagery.

“With the digital twin successfully delivered, the Cordel development team has moved on to focus on the gauging and clearance use cases.”

At 1406 GMT, shares in Cordel Group were down 7.14% at 6.5p.

Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.