An autonomous rail-road amphibious robotic system for railway maintenance using sensor fusion and mobile manipulator

•A novel autonomous road-rail amphibious robotic inspection and repair system for railway maintenance is designed and developed.•An autonomous Command & Control architecture is designed for unmanned remote operating of the full maintenance workflow.•The hardware demonstrator and software integration were developed to achieve sensor-fusion based navigation, flexible track access and release, and inspection and repair with mobile manipulator.•The validation and verification (V&V) on both realistic and operational railway track were conducted with a satisfactory performance.