Robotic Maintenance of Road Infrastructures: The HERON Project

Abstract

Of all public assets, road infrastructure tops the list. Roads are crucial for economic development and growth, providing access to education, health, and employment. The maintenance, repair, and upgrade of roads are therefore vital to road users' health and safety as well as to a well-functioning and prosperous modern economy. The EU-funded HERON project will develop an integrated automated system to adequately maintain road infrastructure. In turn, this will reduce accidents, lower maintenance costs, and increase road network capacity and efficiency. To coordinate maintenance works, the project will design an autonomous ground robotic vehicle that will be supported by autonomous drones. Sensors and scanners for 3D mapping will be used in addition to artificial intelligence toolkits to help coordinate road maintenance and upgrade workflows.

TraCon: A novel dataset for real-time traffic cones detection using deep learning

“…The data used in this paper was collected and manually annotated under the framework of the H2020 HERON project [9]. HERON aims to develop an integrated automated system to perform maintenance and upgrading roadworks tasks, such as sealing cracks, patching potholes, asphalt rejuvenation, autonomous replacement of CUD (removable urban pavement) elements and painting road markings, but also supporting the pre-and post-intervention phase including visual inspections and dispensing and removing traffic cones in an automated and controlled manner.…”

“…This application was implemented with YOLOv5 algorithm which is widely used for object detection problems [8], [12]. We created a dataset of RGB roadwork images that were annotated by engineer experts within the framework of the HERON project [9]. Traffic cone identification task can be addressed as an on-road object detection problem.…”