Blog - Smoothing out issues with road resurfacing

There are huge pressures on road systems across the globe, with a booming population combined with a lack of investment into existing and new road networks. At this year’s Intergeo event, we caught up with Karsten Dietrich, Business Development Manager for Paving EMEA, to find out how technology can be used to help us build and improve road networks more efficiently.

There is a demand for those in the road industry to work smarter: to limit the amount of time roads are closed for, to improve safety for workers, to increase quality, and, as always, to reduce costs. Resurfacing projects to improve current road networks are a costly and time-consuming process, essentially resulting in road works and more traffic.

Here at Topcon we’ve developed a technology to significantly improve the road resurfacing process: SmoothRide. The solution automates much more of the data collection and measurement involved in resurfacing projects.

The first stage of resurfacing using SmoothRide involves mobile mapping using vehicles that scan at speeds of up to 80km per hour. Compared to traditional surveying methods this means no road closures and no collecting data road side, reducing health and safety risks.

Traditional survey methods of data collection involve a surveying team collecting a point, usually around every 15 meters, which does not provide a high density of data. The SmoothRide solution collects data every 20cm in the initial survey, so provides high density, accurate data. This essentially means that all the imperfections in the old road surface are recorded. This data is used in the paving and compacting process to vary the levels of asphalt required to make a perfectly flat surface. This creates a potential risk of replicating the imperfections of the existing road surface.

Find out more about SmoothRide as well as MAGNET Office Site with Resurfacing software here. To see SmoothRide in action, watch our video case study on the runway at Frankfurt Airport.