Automatic roller path tracking and mapping for pavement compaction using infrared thermography

Abstract

Compaction is an important task in asphalt pavement construction. It ensures high quality of the pavement to provide required long-term performance. Intelligent compaction (IC) integrated with global positioning system (GPS) is an innovative technology to help control the compaction quality of asphalt pavement by continuously providing the operator with the roller's current position and the number of rolling passes. However, the high equipment cost and signal disturbance are two identified issues when adopting the GPS for position estimation. This paper proposed a thermal-based method for real-time roller path tracking and mapping in pavement compaction operations. In this method, first, the incremental roller motion between each two consecutive frames was jointly estimated via calculation of the roller's heading direction by exploiting the pavement boundary information and the roller's translation using the optical flow technique. Then, the accuracy of the estimated incremental motion was optimized by incorporation of the roller's lateral position estimated by a position optimization model proposed by the authors. Finally, the roller's global location was estimated by chaining frame-by-frame roller motions recursively. Both laboratory and field validations were conducted to examine the performance of the proposed method, leading to the maximum mean absolute errors along the lateral direction to be 5.2 mm and 3.3 cm, respectively, and the maximum cumulative error rates along the longitudinal direction to be 0.85% and 0.73%, respectively. The validation results signified the method's potential as a low-cost and applicable alternative to the GPS in the current IC technology for roller's position tracking and mapping.

Improvement of small objects detection in thermal images

“…At last Lu et al [21] deal with intelligent compaction and more precisely with real-time roller path tracking and mapping in pavement compaction operations. The authors propose a thermal-based method to overcome the problems due to variable weather conditions.…”

Assessment of Intelligent Unmanned Maintenance Construction for Asphalt Pavement Based on Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation and Analytical Hierarchy Process

“…Through on-site measurements and analysis, they investigated and verified the correlation and applicability of two proposed indicators for controlling compaction quality with compactness and smoothness. Lu et al [11] proposed an intelligent technology for roller path tracking and mapping in pavement compaction. Based on laboratory and field tests, the proposed technology can achieve comparable accuracy to GPS for rollers' lateral position estimation and a satisfactory accuracy for longitudinal position estimation.…”

Cross‐entropy‐based adaptive fuzzy control for visual tracking of road cracks with unmanned mobile robot

“…Kayacan and Chowdhary (2019) developed a tracking error learning control method for mobile robot trajectory tracking in an off-road environment, which leverages the tracking error to dynamically update the feedforward control action (Kayacan & Chowdhary, 2019). Road roller route tracking using a thermal-based technique that integrates intelligent compaction with a global positioning system was proposed (Lu et al, 2021). Zhang et al (2023) summarized the automatic guided vehicle (AGV) and AMR in civil engineering.…”