The process of railway track adjustment is a task which includes bringing, in geometrical terms, the actual track axis to the position ensuring safe and efficient traffic of rail vehicles. The initial calculation stage of this process is to determine approximately the limits of sections of different geometry, i.e. straight lines, arcs and transition curves. This allows to draw up a draft alignment design, which is subject to control the position relative to the current state. In practice, this type of a project rarely meets the requirements associated with the values of corrective alignments. Therefore, it becomes necessary to apply iterated correction of a solution in order to determine the final project, allowing to introduce minor corrections while maintaining the assumed parameters of the route. The degree of complexity of this process is defined by the quality of determining a preliminary draft alignment design. Delimitation of the sections for creation of creating such a design, is usually done by using the curvature diagram (InRail v8.7 Reference Guide [1], Jamka et al [2], Strach [3]), which is, however, sensitive to the misalignment of the track and measurement errors. In their paper Lenda and Strach [4] proposed a new method for creating curvature diagram, based on approximating spline function, theoretically allowing, inter alia, to reduce vulnerability to interference factors. In this study, the method to determine a preliminary draft alignment design for the track with severe overexploitation was used, and thus in the conditions adversely affecting the accuracy of the conducted readings. The results were compared to the ones obtained using classical curvature diagram. The obtained results indicate that the method allows to increase the readability of a curvature graph, which at considerable deregulation of a track takes an irregular shape, difficult to interpret. The method also favourably affects the accuracy of determining the initial parameters of the project, reducing the entire process of calculation.

Robotic total stations are a group of surveying instruments that can be used to measure moving prisms. These devices can generate significant errors during kinematic surveys. This is due to the different speeds of the total station’s measurement subsystems, which results in the observations of the point location being performed in different places of the space. Total stations which are several years old may generate errors of up to a few dozen centimeters. More modern designs, with much lower delays of the mechanical and electronic subsystems, theoretically allow to significantly reduce the values of the errors. This study involved the performance of kinematic tests on the modern robotic total station Leica MS50 in order to determine the values of measurement errors, and also to define the possibility of using them for the above-mentioned applications.

The research was aimed at analysing the factors that affect the accuracy of merging point clouds when scanning over longer distances. Research takes into account the limited possibilities of target placement occurring while scanning opposite benches of quarries or open-pit mines, embankments from opposite banks of rivers etc. In all these cases, there is an obstacle/void between the scanner and measured object that prevents the optimal location of targets and enlarging scanning distances. The accuracy factors for cloud merging are: the placement of targets relative to the scanner and measured object, the target type and instrument range. Tests demonstrated that for scanning of objects with lower accuracy requirements, over long distances, it is optimal to choose flat targets for registration. For objects with higher accuracy requirements, scanned from shorter distances, it is worth selecting spherical targets. Targets and scanned object should be on the same side of the void.