A Pavement Longitudinal Profiler Based on Inertial Measurement and 30 KHz 3D Sensors—A Preliminary Study

Inertial-based roadway longitudinal profiling technology has been widely used since the 1990s in the US for providing a key benchmark on road surface ride quality. For the traditional profilers, point laser rangers or Roline sensors are widely employed to measure the height data between the vehicle body and the pavement. In this paper, a profiler system was designed and implemented to combine pavement height information from a new generation of 3D sensors and the vehicle’s vertical displacement information to yield longitudinal profiles of the pavement. The advantage of the 3D sensor is that it can collect the height information of the complete pavement lane which can provide pavement engineers the complete roadway profiles at any line of sight. Analytical results show that the profiler system is able to provide repeatable profile data and reasonable IRI results. Further development of the presented system is