(ethereal music)
- [Narrator] Technology and transportation
must go together.
That's become the philosophy at TxDOT
as the agency makes good
on its vision of delivering mobility,
enabling economic opportunity
and enhancing the quality of life for all Texans.
Exploring the use of emerging technologies
to improve transportation has become a TxDOT priority.
- We work with our research team and they develop
a portfolio of technologies and it runs a gamut
of IT related technologies, actually more infrastructure
and material focused ones,
next generation vehicles or platforms,
and we flesh out what are all the emerging
technologies across that spectrum, across that portfolio.
Now, which ones do we want to focus on
in maybe the coming year and then coming months.
- [Narrator] To keep technology in focus,
TxDOT formed an external advisory board called
the Texas Technology Task force.
- And you know when we started this, what six or seven
some odd years ago, we're assigned to think, okay
TxDot's traditionally an asphalt
and concrete type organization,
a vast majority of their budget goes to building,
the wonderful transportation infrastructure we have
in the state of Texas
- Primarily the task force members who have
a lot of expertise in technology, research and development,
implementation or regulation, either from
research institutions, industry or public agencies,
bring their experience to the meetings
and to some of the talks and discussions that we have
to inform us of something they might be hearing about.
From there, we've got a research team
that helps vet the technologies
and what we're working towards called
the technology utilization plan,
which takes you to these technologies and prioritizes them.
- When we started looking at technology, that again, six or
seven years ago is when automated vehicles were really
starting to peak.
They'd been around for a long time
and people have looked at them, but all of a
sudden they started becoming real
and so where I'm going with this is that we take a look
at what technologies are emerging,
kind of the same timeframe, the whole concept of big data.
If you went and did an internet search 10 years ago,
big data, wasn't a term, now it's a term.
Same thing with drones.
- [Darran] So we spun off a research project just on that
to how might TxDot itself use unmanned aerial systems
and now those are being used
more and more often across the department for everything
from bridge inspections, to traffic incident management
and clearance of accident scenes more quickly.
Another key part of the work of this project
has been just to generate that thought process.
What else could we be doing?
Okay. You know we're over here talking about
improved striping, well, what about improve markings
and things like that that might also enhance operations.
So I think it's led to some of that as well.
- Every couple months do like a peer review
type of assessment of other states,
according to each technology to see what they've done,
how they've done it, what were the costs?
Who were the partners? What are the lessons learned?
And make sure and keep a compilation of that
so that as they are thinking about moving forward
we can offer that information for their consideration.
- [Darran} There are people that are printing
whole segments of of bridges now with
concrete printing technologies.
And that's something I think we need to look at, right.
We need to think, is that something Texas needs to be doing
is it a value add or is that just a gee whiz thing?
And there's a number of other ones like that,
it's time for us to move forward and continue to
look at those.
So, yeah, I think for the foreseeable future
there is great value in having this continuous discussion
and this forward thinking research and bringing that
into a closer range for the department,
then to either decide, do we need more research
a specific research topic, or are we ready to begin to
do something with it?
And I think that's a great value
of it's led to a lot of those initiatives.
- [Narrator] For more information and to find
the publications for this project,
please visit the TxDOT research library
at the link shown below.