Traditionally, highway resurfacing projects have been a challenge, not only for the contractor but also for the inconvenienced community through which the road passes. To collect the project data needed to perform the resurface, lanes typically need to be closed so a team of surveyors can collect data points from along the side of the road—while diverted traffic whizzes past. It’s a slow, cumbersome and dangerous process that affects the daily commuter flow and the contractor's project timeline.

But things are better.

Designed to work at the speed of highway traffic, new resurfacing systems safely assist road resurfacing contractors without the need for road or lane closures. These systems can be fully automated with GNSS and sonic tracker control and deliver accurate thickness boundaries while maintaining projected yield, eliminating the need for survey strings, averaging skis and lasers.

The systems use a scanner that is attached to a vehicle and the downward facing laser scanner connects to a standard tow hitch to collect millions of points at scan rates of up to 100 times per second. Vehicles can then drive at normal speeds to collect data over miles of road. The collected data is automatically timestamped and stored for the next step of data management and point cloud generation. These types of systems can help contractors with variable depth milling and achieve uniform thickness in paving.

New resurfacing systems are designed to offer 3-D scanning collected while driving the jobsite road, which can replace hours of surveyor-obtained cross-section measurements. The systems’ software is designed to deliver confidence throughout the paving and milling process by providing the key data needed to complete the job accurately to spec.