Road Repair Technology

The most common pavement maintenance methods encompass patching, crack sealing, seal coating and resurfacing with an asphalt overlay.  When it comes to maintaining and repairing your asphalt surfaces, you definitely want to hire a professional.  To provide our readers with expert tips, we reached out to Mike with Asphalt Paving Nashville, to provide us with some professional insight into robotic technology and paving repair.

Seal coating is essential to expanding the life of a pavement exterior.  Sealing the outer layer is befitting for withstood and worn surface, little and minor breaking in the asphalt, and segregated or raveling surfaces.  By closing the existing pavement through seal coating, the vital elements are locked into the current pavement while keeping water and other components from infiltrating the exterior of the asphalt pavement surface thus expanding its life.

Patching is appropriate for potholes, depressions, “alligator” breaking, and slippage chinks & rutting.  When longitudinal and transverse chinks in the pavement become more concentrated in a particular locality, it is time to make repairs to minimize the influences and salvage the pavement exterior as much as possible.

Crack sealing is critical to extending the life of an asphalt pavement surface.  Crack closing prevents water from infiltrating through the road surface and into the groundwork rock and sub-degree.

Robotics asphalt repair can consistently produce high quality paving solutions.  With the aid of robotics in pavement repair, the completion of the project will be faster, subsequently leading to greater productivity and reduction of costs.

The goal of the robotic system is to create a self-steering and navigating paver that would allow road engineers to improve the quality of repairing asphalt pavements, while also being more environmentally friendly.  Some of these robotic systems include The CIRPAV prototype, RoboPaver, Road robot, among others, to automate paving operations and repairs.

The Road paving Robot consists of a single piece of equipment that integrates several automated systems.  The mechanical systems include:

• Automated introduction of asphalt
• Automated administration of asphalt conveyance
• Programmed control of bitumen spreading
• Computerized steering control with mechanical sensor and programmed control of paving speed
• Automatically controlled start and stop of all paving roles of the machine

The Road paving Robot also includes computer-controlled screeding capabilities.
The operation of the Road Robot was divided among four subsystems:

• asphalt materials logistics
• traveling mechanism
• road surface geometry

The materials logistics of the asphalt subsystem consist of onboard sensors that determine the distance from the feed vehicle to the asphalt repair Robot and then adjusts the movement and operation of the equipment to receive the asphalt into the material hopper.  Asphalt is then transported and placed using conveyors.  The discharge is controlled by measuring the height of asphalt on the conveyors.  The traveling mechanism subsystem controls the speed of the robot, the start/stop function, and the steering initiated.  As long as adequate tolerance on the quantity of asphalt is being maintained, the conveyor system supplies a constant head of asphalt in front of the screed.  The asphalt Robot repair steering system is applied when no reference or other line is available.  The laser unit scans the area around it and calculates the angle between the robot and the pre-positioned reflection elements.  The road surface geometry subsystem controls the volume of discharge based on the pre-defined thickness, profile, and lateral slope of the pavement section.  The screeding subsystem controls height adjustments, vibrations for compacting, and screed orientation.  However, as was mentioned previously, this subsystem requires operator assistance.

The operator- assisted robotics could improve the efficiency of the paving process and repairs, while at the same time enhance the quality of the finished pavement section.

Be sure to visit our sponsor:  Nashville Asphalt Paving Service for any questions regarding paving and robotic technology.