(ambient music)
- [Narrator] For decades, measuring the amount
of friction on state roadways has been done
with special breaking equipment and water.
The process requires lots of man-hours
and lots of water, but that tedious process
may be changing.
Researchers with the Center for Transportation Safety
are turning to technology that would allow
friction measurement to take place without water
and at highway speeds.
- Promote safety is one of TxDOT's
goals and objectives.
Skid resistance plays a critical role
in maintaining the safe roads for the state of Texas.
- You can measure friction in two different ways;
directly or indirectly.
More state DOTs own equipment
that can measure friction directly.
They drive on the road, they apply water,
and they measure the friction.
The issue with this direct type of measurement
is that they use lot of water
and make these pieces of equipment very inefficient.
A state like TxDOT can only measure
about 25% of their farm-to-market network
and only 50% of the interstate network
on an annual basis.
- By applying the high-speed 3D laser technology,
this project proposed to collect and use
pavement surface texture data as a proxy
of surface skid.
- We implement a high-speed, high-definition laser
that can measure the bigger features
on the surface of the road,
that we call it macro texture.
But the newest laser can also measure
the smaller features, which we call it micro texture.
We use this information and we calculate friction.
- In this project, actually,
the research team proposed a new instrument
which has two major components.
One is called grip tester.
The other is called laser texture scanner.
The researchers, they use this equipment
to collect a sample for different pavement types
on highways near Austin.
- It has about 30 different pavement types,
and we obtain accuracies in the order
of 80 to 90% on friction prediction.
- If we have a texture which can be collected
in a faster way and we have model
to correlate the texture with the skid,
we can have a full coverage of entire network,
which will help the pavement engineers
make a better decision.
- This is laser. We don't need water.
You can attach this laser to a vehicle,
drive 50, 60, 70 miles an hour,
and obtain full coverage on an annual basis.
This is huge for TxDOT,
particularly from a safety point of view.
- [Narrator] For more information and to find
the publications for this project,
please visit the TxDOT research library
at the link shown below.