| Project Detail |
Keeping road users and workers safe through collaborative robotics and modularisation
There are many health and safety risks when it comes to using and working on roads. The EU-funded InfraROB project will focus on automating, robotising and modularising road construction and maintenance work. More specifically, it will develop, among others, autonomous robotised systems and machinery to carry out line marking, repaving, and the repair of cracks and potholes. It will also develop collaborative robotised safety systems for construction workers and road users. The project further aims to integrate pavement management system and traffic management system solutions for a holistic, unified management of road infrastructure and live traffic.
With the aim to reduce workers’ exposure to live traffic and construction machines, increase the availability of the transport network, reduce the cost of repetitive tasks, and increase the safety of road users, InfraROB promotes significant advances in automating, robotising and modularizing the construction, upgrade and maintenance of the road infrastructure.
By focussing on the road bed and, particularly, on roads paved with asphalt (the most widely applied type of pavement in Europe, accounting for 90% of all paved roads and highways ), the project will develop autonomous robotized systems/machinery for (i) (re)paving, (ii) repairing cracks/potholes in the road surface, and (iii) line marking. In addition, it will develop (iv) robotized safety systems for workers and road users. It will then develop (v) integrated one-piece precast construction elements for the roadside drainage serving a major degree of modularization in road design and construction/upgrade.
In order to cope with optimal road maintenance planning, the project will furthermore upgrade existing Pavement Management Systems (PMS) to use digital twin models of road networks that track changes of their physical counterparts in real time, to give support for maintenance planning based on dynamic predictive modeling and the acquisition of real-time data on pavement conditions. Finally, yet evenly important, to provide for the safe and coordinated deployment of automated road maintenance robots, the project will attempt the integration of Pavement Management System (PMS) and Traffic Management System (TMS) solutions in order to allow for a holistic, integrated management of road infrastructure and traffic over the whole lifespan. |
