The InfraROB project

Challenge

Road transport is the most widely used mode of inland passenger transport in most European countries today, having a fundamental role in their social as well as economic development and growth.

It is thus essential to work on a proper road infrastructure management and maintenance and, alongside to the need to ensure network capacity, improving safety of both construction workers and road users in relation to work zone is therefore of great importance (it is worth remembering that as on a country-based average, 4% of accidents take place in work zones).

The InfraROB project (Grant Agreement n. 955337) aims to reduce workers’ exposure to live traffic, construction machines and the cost of repetitive tasks, as well as increase the safety of road users and the availability of the transport network.

To achieve its goals, the project promotes significant solutions in automating, robotizing and modularizing the construction, upgrade and maintenance of the road infrastructure focusing on roadbed and, particularly, on roads paved with asphalt.

Even if ‘discrete’ engineering structures like bridges or tunnels are even so important pavement is probably the most representative and critical element of roads; it is a fundamental ‘continuous’ engineering structure that has the duty to carry the whole road traffic for the whole length of a road and its conditions certainly influence road users’ safety.

To this end the project aims to focus on roadbed and pavement, developing autonomous robotized systems/machinery for (re)paving, repairing cracks/potholes in the road surface and line marking, robotized safety systems for workers/road users and integrated one-piece precast construction elements for the roadside drainage. In order to cope with optimal road maintenance planning, the project will furthermore upgrade pavement management systems and last but not least it will provide a distributed sensing system based on fiber optic sensors (FOS) technology for damage detection.

Approach

In this project RINA combines its expertise in roads and highways with those on structural monitoring, integrity management, and digitalization of services.

A future-oriented system that continuously monitors the condition of the road over a long period of time through the embedding of distributed FOS in the asphalt will be developed together with digital monitoring solutions destined to a variety of customers for the real-time monitoring of their assets.

More in depth we will:

- design and develop a solution for distributed sensing for pavement damage detection involving Fibre Optic Sensors. We are responsible for providing the whole set of specifications of the sensor system and the procedure for its integration inside asphalt for damage detection monitoring; proper strain sensitive optical fibers conceived for strain monitoring are selected and a suitable strategy for thermal effects compensation is defined and implemented. Mid-scale tests with data acquisition to validate the FOS technology and sensitivity and functional laboratory test on pre-cracked asphalt elements, instrumented with FOS, are performed.

- develop a digital-twin-based add-on application as a service that will be offered to road operators and public administrations. It is a web-based application, conceived as a plug-in/add-on to conventional Pavement Management Systems, which will provide a 3D, BIM-supported representation of the infrastructure (with focus on a specific road section under analysis), enriched with information related to the infrastructure/pavement status gathered at specific time intervals that will render the model dynamic and periodically self-updating (i.e. a digital twin that track changes of their physical counterparts through the periodic acquisition of data from a variety of condition monitoring sensors, including distributed FOS integrated automatically in the asphalt pavement for damage detection)

- Provide the KPI-based assessment of the InfraROB solutions. Impacts and projections on how they would change with the introduction of the InfraROB solutions in the business practice will be made. A reduced number of most probable use case scenarios will be analysed and their specific impacts will be assessed. Finally, the expected Return on Investment (RoI) comparing the savings originated by the InfraROB solutions and the implementation costs will be estimated.

Conclusion

The main outcomes of InfraROB in terms of benefits both for potential clients and the market can be summarized as follows:

- Autonomous robotized machinery for construction, upgrade or large maintenance interventions: the project will provide an autonomous and autonomously working (i.e. robotized) road construction train consisting of paver, feeder and roller, which includes all required sensors, controllers, displays and high-speed cloud connection, to increase the overall productivity of (re)paving.

- Autonomous robotized machinery for the routine or periodic maintenance of the pavement: the project will develop a prototype of autonomous robotized head to repair potholes and cracks during asphalt routine maintenance and a new autonomously-working line marking robot for doing road markings with cold paint.

- Modularization of road construction/upgrade through industrial prefabrication: the project will develop a new multi-functional, all-in-one precast concrete element applicable as roadside safety structure / restraint system and as roadside construction element at the same time, serving a major degree of modularization in road design and construction/upgrade.

- Collaborative operation of safety cone robots and Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) for work zone segmentation and signaling: the project will implement a new concept of collaborative operation between land safety cone robots and RPAS for enhanced work zone segmentation and signaling addressing both road users (drivers) and maintenance personnel (workers) building on new AI algorithms for unsupervised monitoring of safety conditions in work zones.

- Upgrading of Management Systems to ensure safer operations and maintenance: the project will both upgrade existing Pavement Management System (PMS)applications taking into account the way the introduction of robotics will affect the classical pavement maintenance approaches, as well as develop a digital-twin-based add-on application for PMS entailing the periodic acquisition of data on actual pavement conditions for a better condition-based assessment of critical road sections.

- Field validation and demonstration of the developed solutions.

Project Consortium