Characterization Road Surface by Means of Laser Scanner Technologies

The monitoring of pavement distress takes a key role with respect to the functionality of a road structure, which is necessary to schedule maintenance works, optimizing the available resources. The identification, classification and quantification of different typology of distress involve complex practical activities and data processing that are sometimes inefficient and risky since interfere with road traffic. The aim of our work is the analysis and the three-dimensional reconstruction of the paved surface making use of innovative technologies of measure and computation, in order to obtain a complete and accurate data sets. With the evolving LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) technologies, including static and mobile laser scanners, it is possible to obtain very dense point clouds, that allow to build an accurate geometrical model of the road surface. The experimentation concerns a road segment whose surface has been surveyed by means of two static terrestrial laser scanners and a mobile mapping system to analyse their performances and compare the results in a test case. The collected data have been interpolated to obtain a digital elevation model of the road surface. The numerical model has been implemented in a software package that predicts the performance of vehicles in response to driver controls.