Improving Displacement Measurement for Evaluating Longitudinal Road Profiles

2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper introduces a half-wavelength peak matching (HWPM) model, which improves the accuracy of vehicle based longitudinal road profilers used in evaluating road unevenness and mega-textures. In this application, the HWPM model is designed for profilers which utilize a laser displacement sensor with an accelerometer for detecting surface irregularities. The process of converting acceleration to displacement by double integration (which is used in most rofilers) is error-prone, and although there are techniques to minimize the effect of this error, this paper proposes a novel approach for improving the generated road profile results. The technique amends the vertical displacement derived from the accelerometer samples, by using data from the laser displacement sensor as a reference. The vehicle based profiler developed for this experiment (which uses the HWPM model) shows a huge improvement in detected longitudinal irregularities when compared with pre-processed results, and uses a 3-m rolling straight edge as a benchmark.Peer reviewe