An Instrumented Vehicle for Efficient and Accurate 3D Mapping of Roads

Abstract

This article describes an electric vehicle equipped with a laser scanner and a highly accurate absolute positioning system aimed at surveying the geometry of roads. The main advantages of the proposed system with respect to conventional topographic procedures are the possibility of achieving a much higher density of surveyed points and its efficiency while keeping almost the same accuracy-a standard deviation of 12 mm of absolute error. The data acquisition process is managed by an on-board computer which, in a synchronized way, deals with laser scanning and readings from three realtime-kinematics-enabled millimeter GPS receivers. The three-dimensional position and orientation of the vehicle (6 degrees of freedom) all along its trajectory is calculated off-line by a custom software and, with that information, the system also obtains the absolute coordinates of the road scanned points. This article also presents a rigorous description regarding the theory behind 3D reconstruction and the calibration process.

Review of remote sensing methodologies for pavement management and assessment

“…LiDAR is often used for mapping topography and the creation of digital elevation models. When mounted on a moving vehicle, road surfaces can be mapped using the dense and accurate 3D LiDAR point cloud [89]. Unlike other techniques, such as photogrammetry, LiDAR is not restricted by the sun angle and can be implemented during the day or night.…”

Evaluation of Laser Range-Finder Mapping for Agricultural Spraying Vehicles

“…[9]) where there are physical, man-made structures that assist in the registration of 3d scans, improving the quality of the resulting maps. Other examples include mapping solutions for off-road autonomous car driving [13], mining operations [5] and autonomous road inspection [8]. The latter system (RoadBot) fuses information from range scanners thanks to precise pose estimation obtained from high precision GPS (i.e.…”

A Pavement Crack Detection Method Combining 2D with 3D Information Based on Dempster‐Shafer Theory

“…Such method has higher measurement accuracy than stereovision but the system is too complicated for practical application. More recently, 3D laser scanning method (Park et al., ; Sansoni et al., ) has been widely used for pavement crack detection in light of its ability of discriminating the measure interferences from the actual cracks and the simplicity of its implementation (Monti, ; Bursanescu and Blais, ; Wang and Smadi, ; Tsai et al., ; Zhang and Elaksher, ; Moreno et al., ). It projects the laser stripe emitted from a structured light source onto the detected object and uses a CCD camera to capture the light line image, from which the 3D contour of the object can be then obtained (Zhou and Zhang, ; Tsai et al., ).…”