Recommendations for Selection of Automated Distress Measuring Equipment

Phase 2 of Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Research Project 0-6663: Evaluation of Pavement Rutting and Distress Measurements had the objective of evaluating the accuracy and precision of the new automated system developed by a TxDOT research group (composed of staff from the Construction Division’s Materials and Pavement Section) for the high-speed measurement of pavement surface distresses, texture, and cross slope. In addition, equipment vendors participated in the study by providing equipment that represents the state of the practice—the automated distress collection vehicle. As part of this evaluation, the TxDOT system was compared to that of three automated system vendors in order to identify the best equipment for each pavement management data type. The high-speed measurements reported by each of the four automated systems that participated in the Phase 2 experiment were compared to manual measurements taken statically by experienced raters. The Phase 2 experiment comprised twenty 550-ft-long pavement test sections, including both flexible and rigid pavements, which were selected to represent the main pavement characteristics encountered on the Texas highway network. Phase 2 analyses also included a qualitative comparison between the crack maps produced by the different automated systems at highway speeds and digital crack maps collected statically by manual measurement of the cracks.