Multimodal measurement system for road analysis and surveying of road surroundings

Identification and documentation of the state of road infrastructure are rapidly gaining in importance due to increased traffic. This requires regular inspection in order to optimize maintenance efforts. Additionally, construction projects are getting more complex and demand digital planning and building processes. The data, which forms the basis for these processes, must be rapidly acquired and it must be digital. In this paper, a measurement vehicle is presented that efficiently collects all desired data. The vehicle is based on a modular system platform from the Fraunhofer-Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM. It enables measurements for road analysis while driving with up to 80 km/h. Four lasers quantify the longitudinal evenness of the road with submillimetre precision and kHz temporal resolution. A pavement profile scanner built by Fraunhofer IPM is used to measure the transverse evenness of the road with millimetre precision and a 2 MHz sampling rate. Two cameras and an illumination system provide continuous high-resolution and high-contrast images of the road surface for the quantification of the road condition. Furthermore, additional instruments are mounted for the surveying of road surroundings. A clearance profile scanner built by Fraunhofer IPM scans a 345° area perpendicular to the driving direction and delivers 3D data with millimetre precision. Four cameras acquire highresolution images of the surrounding in all directions. In combination with a sophisticated post-processing pipeline, which extracts semantically segmented information from the images, this yields a digital, semantically interpreted representation of the mapped urban area.