High Efficiency Road Status Monitoring System

This paper presents an application where an integrated GPS/IMU system is used for land survey (mounted on a van), providing a significant improvement on the efficiency of the road status monitoring process. Being initially developed for aircraft navigation, the system integrates one (or more) GPS receiver with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), assembled with an industrial PC that stores the data and registers the various events that the operator introduces during the survey. Some surveys have already been performed with this system where, along with the road profile, some attributes where gathered, such as: • traffic and road signs position; • traffic and road signs type; • traffic and road signs conservation state; • pavement signs type and positioning; • type of pavement material; • pavement conservation state; • characterization and location of city infrastructures. The resulting data is processed a posteriori and the results are presented in a CAD environment with association to an object database. This final interface is very useful for road management, significantly reducing the time spent in the office analyzing the its status, and the use of several database utilities, such has queries and association by attribute, allows immediate and diverse analysis to be performed. This paper describes the implemented system and also the obtained results of different surveys, in dense urban areas and in more than 550 km of intercity roads, focusing on the usefulness of such system and its resulting analysis environment. A video camera was also used to collect image information while surveying which is useful in the processing stage (and, with proper image processing tools, it can improve this process’ efficiency).