Skip to main content

Hi-tech road surface scanner surveys West Midlands highways

The condition of highways in the UK’s West Midlands is to be surveyed using the latest vehicle-based technology from Yotta DCL under a contract awarded by the consortium of West Midlands Local Authorities. The highway technology and surveying company will use its new Tempest survey vehicle to capture road surface condition and forward facing video across the region’s road network, plus pavement images at normal traffic speeds. Yotta DCL will survey a total of 1250 km of roads under the terms of the co
August 21, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
The condition of highways in the UK’s West Midlands is to be surveyed using the latest vehicle-based technology from 5956 Yotta DCL under a contract awarded by the consortium of West Midlands Local Authorities.

The highway technology and surveying company will use its new Tempest survey vehicle to capture road surface condition and forward facing video across the region’s road network, plus pavement images at normal traffic speeds.

Yotta DCL will survey a total of 1250 km of roads under the terms of the contract, which could be extended by three years. By providing both scanner and forward facing video and pavement images, the Authorities will be able to cross reference road condition data against high quality images. The camera technology onboard the new Tempest vehicle is a major advance in quality, breaks new ground in high definition video, and is unique to Yotta DCL.

Tempest has been developed using new processing technologies to improve accuracy and the vehicles are equipped with forward facing cameras which can be used to provide street level images.  The system is designed and built exclusively by Yotta DCL and is accredited by the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) for UK scanner and Traffic Speed Condition Survey (TRACS) specifications.

“By overlaying the scanner data onto the video we can get a real life view of the data. The ability to cross reference the data against the video helps to guide our decision making as we can actually see the condition of the road surface on screen,” says Paul Price, senior engineer, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Growth of ANPR applications for enforcement, tolling and more
    February 1, 2012
    Automatic number plate recognition continues to find new applications beyond the traditional. In coming years, we can expect the application set to grow significantly Moore's Law has seen to it that computer processing power has improved out of all comparison in the 30-plus years since the first working Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system was created by the UK's Police Scientific Development Branch. The attendant increases in systems' capabilities have resulted in ANPR being deployed globally
  • Missouri’s smart solution for rural road monitoring
    July 7, 2017
    David Crawford sees how Missouri is using commercially available information to rapidly improve monitoring and driver information on rural highways. Missouri is a predominantly rural state with the second largest number of farms in the country and agriculture the main occupation in 97 of its 114 counties. US statistics starkly reveal how road accidents in rural areas tend to be more serious than in urban regions and of the 32,000 US motorists killed each year, 54% die on roads in rural areas even though onl
  • National funding cuts cause fragmentation of US ITS market
    February 1, 2012
    Paul Everett, Research Director with IMS Research, looks at how ITS deployment varies across the US and what this means in terms of market potential for systems manufacturers and suppliers At the end of 2010, the US will have a total resident population of close to 310 million, rising to an estimated 439 million by 2050.
  • Russia 2018 World Cup: ITS can win it
    June 5, 2018
    Teams and supporters will cover vast distances in Russia for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Stephane Clauss from Sony Europe’s Image Sensing Solutions division examines how the latest camera technologies can be deployed to help things run smoothly over the next month or so... For one month, from June 14, Russia is hosting the 2018 FIFA World Cup. This is the largest country in the world and the distances between venues will be larger than at almost any other World Cup - bar the finals in the US and Brazil.