You don’t necessarily have to live in a cold climate to experience how roads start to deteriorate once cracks begin developing in the asphalt surface. even a lot more discouraging than the potholes, dips, and road erosion is the snarled traffic that results from closing lanes to repair them. Researchers at the Georgia tech research Institute have established a way to detect and swiftly fix these cracks with very little human interaction, making the process a bit less painful than before.
The automatic road patcher resides on a trailer which is towed behind a service automobile at 5 km/h. Cameras mounted near the front of the device detect cracks down to 3mm in width using an variety of LED lights to guide the way. once a fault has been detected, nozzles mounted under the trailer blast the road with liquid tar to seal the crack before it becomes a real problem.
The system seems to work fairly well in the tests we’ve seen, and researchers are tweaking the processing software to make the rig even a lot more effective before rolling it out on a broader scale.
[via Gizmodo]