Design and Implementation of a Manipulator System for Roadway Crack Sealing

Crack detection and crack sealing are challenging tasks which have been researched for decades due to the complicated roadway conditions in real world. Especially, crack sealing is an important procedure used to extend the life of road pavement. This paper develops and implements a kind of manipulator system for roadway crack sealing, which consists of a six-degree-of-freedom(6-DoF) manipulator with a novel crack sealing end-effector, a stereo camera, an air pump, a glue barrel and a laptop. The paper presents the hardware construction and working schematic of the manipulation system. Before crack sealing, a supervised method based on deep learning is used to detect the cracks and obtain the cracks' image information, which can be merged with depth information to acquire the accurate location information of cracks. We validate the feasibility of the crack sealing end-effector which can be applied to seal cracks on uneven road surface by indoor simulation tests.