The project

Autostrade per l'Italia operates and maintains an extensive highway network of about 3000 km throughout Italy, connecting major cities, towns, and regions. The network features more than 218 service areas, about 4200 bridges and viaducts and more than 420 km of tunnels. Autostrade per l’Italia has been deploying a dedicated vehicle, called IRIS, to document the infrastructure through high-resolution panoramic images. The customer contacted 3DT as they were interested in adding highly accurate 3D measurements of the road and the surroundings of the infrastructures and use the point clouds to detect, model and classify various assets, including among others the road markings and the road signs, the geometry of the track and the carriageway, the road barriers, the overpasses and the tunnels. Scanfly DUO was selected as the perfect answer to the customer’s demand. The dual, multi-profile Lidar system, grants the required density of the 3D point cloud.

Workflow

Scanfly Duo can be operated by a single operator in the field through the SmartSurvey software the initialization of the navigation system and a warm-up to bring the system measurement to the nominal levels. Typically, this procedure is completed in just a few minutes, outside of the track of interest. Then, the operator proceeds and activates the recording, traveling the designated route at a speed of up to 100 km/h. This avoids any interference with regular highway traffic. Later at the office, the trajectory of the survey is estimated with an RMS accuracy in the range of 3 cm using the RINEX corrections from nearby base station - or multiple base stations from network. Finally, the point cloud is generated using SmartProcessing Lidar, the 3DT proprietary direct geo-referencing software. The software also processes all the images taken from the 60.5 MP panoramic camera and automatically anonymize the license plates of other vehicles and the faces of the pedestrians that may be in sight. Export is performed in the industry standard LAS format, and the data made available for the analysis of the detection and the classification of the items interest.

Results

Autostrade per l’Italia validated the accuracy of the survey by comparing the position of selected control points against reference data in their database. The digital twin of the infrastructure delivered enabled the organization to virtually travel the road and extract at any time valued information about the assets for the internal needs of their organization.

The Scanfly DUO advantages

Autostrade validated the use of Scanfly DUO for the use in high-speed surveying of road infrastructures. The combination of the hardware device and the software tools has been proven as effective for the creation of a valuable digital twin, with no interferences to the regular traffic and without concerns to the safety of the operators. The exclusive multi-profile, dual Lidar architecture plays an important role in this sense, as it helps to increase the density of the points measured in the road and its surroundings and minimize the shadows of the occlusions caused by other vehicles during the surveys.