An Instrumented Vehicle for Efficient and Accurate 3D Mapping of Roads

This article describes an electric vehicle equipped with a laser scanner and a highly accurate absolute positioning system aimed at surveying the geometry of roads. The main advantages of the proposed system with respect to conventional topographic procedures are the possibility of achieving a much higher density of surveyed points and its efficiency while keeping almost the same accuracy—a standard deviation of 12 mm of absolute error. The data acquisition process is managed by an on-board computer which, in a synchronized way, deals with laser scanning and readings from three realtime-kinematics-enabled millimeter GPS receivers. The three-dimensional position and orientation of the vehicle (6 degrees of freedom) all along its trajectory is calculated off-line by a custom software and, with that information, the system also obtains the absolute coordinates of the road scanned points. This article also presents a rigorous description regarding the theory behind 3D reconstruction and the calibration process.