Design And Development Of A General Purpose Embedded Acquisition System For Transportation Applications

Abstract

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) uses many different instruments for quality assurance of new and existing pavements. These instruments measure the different characteristics of the pavement such as the longitudinal profile, transverse profile, texture, rut formation etc to determine the smoothness and ride quality of the pavement. These instruments mainly consist of different sensors such as a laser, an accelerometer and/or a gyroscope to calculate the ride quality. Different ride statistics like the International Roughness Index (IRI), Mean Profile Depth (MPD), Present Serviceability Index (PSI) are then calculated andused to determine the need for repair of the pavements. Currently all these instruments have to be used individually to measure the ride statistics. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of a new type ofline laser for calculating the road profile and to design and develop a platform for the simultaneous operation of all the different type of profiling instruments. The research analyzed the different approaches for implementing the tire-bridging algorithm for the line laser and evaluated the performance of each approach for calculating the longitudinal road profiles. A profiling system with the wide line laser was successfully developed and certified for use on actual roads. A dual laser profiling system, which can collect data from two profiling systems simultaneously, was also successfully developed and certified. Finally, this thesis proposed a profiling platform that can be used in conjunction with the video capture control system for the 3D Bridge MonitoringSystem.