Description

Short technical description: Purpose: To support the research needs of FHWA technical offices in the following areas: * Identification, development, and field demonstration of advanced sensor systems for the collection of data on, over, or under the road. * Development of state–of–the–art signal processing algorithms to extract actionable information from the sensor data streams. * Identification and development of ways to visualize sometimes very complex information so that it is useful to the practitioner. * Technology transfer – To communicate results to the larger community through field demonstrations, and the delivery of presentations and papers to appropriate audiences. * Providing independent perspective on road data collection technologies. Laboratory Description: The DHML is located at the FHWA Turner–Fairbank Highway Research Center, in McLean, Virginia. It includes 1200 square feet of general shop space, and 240 sq. ft. of separate office space. The working area is characterized by work benches appropriate for the building and testing of electromechanical components. The lab space includes a single–width overhead door for access to a single–vehicle bay where experimental vehicles can be constructed and maintained. Laboratory Capabilities: Researchers in the Digital Highway Measurement Laboratory develop sensor and data processing technologies and methodologies for a wide range of data collection challenges. This DHM Lab's research and development portfolio includes: * The Advanced Pavement Evaluation Vehicle, which uses state of the art step–frequency ground penetrating radar to create three–dimensional subsurface maps in order to measure pavement thickness, locate subsurface objects such as re–bar or utilities, and to detect and classify pavement distress such as de–lamination, voids, and fractures.. * The evaluation of the performance limits of traditional inertial profilers. * Establishing a formal model relating pavement–tire noise to the texture of the pavement surface. * The Ultra–Light Inertial Profiler, a Segway–mounted inertial profiler for use on conventional pavement assessment tasks, as well as to conduct ADA assessments of sidewalks. * The Digital Highway Measurement System, an instrumented vehicle which combined laser scanning sensors, high accuracy nationwide differential global positioning system and an airline–quality inertial navigation unit, in order to accurately measure roadway geometry and to build three–dimensional maps of features of interest on, over, or beside the road. Unique features: Laboratory Equipment: The laboratory houses the following equipment. * Computational resources — One Dell T3500 Intel QuadCore 64 bit workstation.Two Dell T3500 Intel QuadCore 32 bit workstations. One Dell T5500 Intel QuadCore workstation running Linux. Internet–2 (100Gb/s) connection to Argonne National Laboratory Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center's 1024 core cluster. * Data "cave" — 24 Tb disk–swappable mass storage for research data. * Development tools: PGI C++; Matlab w/signal processing toolbox; LabWindows/CVI. * Visualization tools: 3D–Doctor; ArcView GIS; GMT (Linux–based open source 3D visualization software). * Vehicle dynamics simulation software: CarSim. * Other applications: Autocad; MathCad. Laboratory Services: The DHM Laboratory provides sensor and signal processing development and evaluation services in support of research efforts at FHWA offices at TFHRC and elsewhere. Specified type of facility: road measurements (above, below, and on the sides)

Keywords

road measurements

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