EVALUATE THE USE OF FPGA SoC FOR REAL TIME DATA ACQUISITION AND AGGREGATE MICRO-TEXTURE MEASUREMENT USING LASER SENSORS

Abstract

Aggregate texture has been found to play an important role in improving the longevity of highways and pavements. Aggregates with appropriate surface roughness level have an improved bonding with asphalt binder and concrete mixture to produce a more durable road surface. Macro-texture has been found to effect certain other important features of the road surface for example, the skid resistance, flow of water on the surface and noise of the tyre on road. However, more research need to done to access the impact of surface texture at micro-meter level. Accurate measurement of the micro-texture at high resolution and in real-time is a challenging task. In the first part, this thesis work presents a proof of concept for a laser based micro-texture measurement equipment capable of measuring texture at 0.2 micro-meter resolution, supporting a maximum sampling rate of up to 50 KHz with a precision motion control for aggregate movement at a step size of 0.1 micro-meter. In the second part, usability of field programmable gateway array (FPGA) System on chip has been evaluated against the need for high speed real time data acquisition and high performance computing to accurately measure micro-texture. Hardware architecture is designed to efficiently leverage the capabilities of FPGA fabric. Software is implemented for dedicated multi-softcore operation, concurrently utilizing the capabilities of the on-board ARM Cortex A9 applications processor for real-time processing needs and a high throughput Ethernet communication model for remote data storage. Evaluation results are presented based on effective use of FPGA fabric in terms of data acquisition, processing needs and accuracy of the desired measurement equipment.