Hi-tech vehicles to scan roads

CM flags off the state-of-the-art survey vehicles that will collect data of R&B roads

Vijayawada: The Roads and Buildings department will use state-of-the-art multi-purpose high technology network survey vehicles for collection of high quality data on the roads built and maintained by the department in the State. Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu inspected these survey vehicles at the camp office and flagged them off on Wednesday.

These vehicles are sourced from Australian Road Research Board by Andhra Pradesh Road Development Corporation (APRDC), which is a part of Roads and Buildings department. APRDC has taken up establishment of AP Road Management System (APRMS) under AP Road Sector Project (taken up with World Bank loan assistance) on the entire R& B road network of 41,000 km at a cost of Rs 20 crore.

Out of Rs 20 crore for the project, the department is spending Rs 6 crore on data collection and sources said that the data collection on entire road network will be completed by August 2016. The data is collected by using Hawk Eye network. The vehicle has digital laser profilers, digital cameras, GPS, crack detection improvement and data acquisition systems.

Cameras that are affixed to the vehicle will capture the physical features like road carriage-way width, shoulder width, road boundaries, location of road furniture, bridge/culverts locations etc. It also captures
the pavement condition like potholes, cracks, edge breakings, rutting, road surface undulations etc and all the information is geo-tagged.

During the data collection, a vehicle with falling weight deflectometer will also be used to collect pavement structural deflection, to assess the strength of the pavement, remaining life and strengthening requirements. The data will be accessed by various R&B offices in the entire State for planning design, operation and maintenance management.

The data will also be useful for rolling out plans such as annual road condition reports, annual performance reports, prioritisation of annual maintenance and road improvement plans together with yearly budget proposals.  ­