Development of an Optimal Trajectory Planning Algorithm for an Automated Pavement Crack Sealer

Abstract

In the last two decades, several tele-operated and machine-vision-assisted systems have been developed in the construction and maintenance area, such as pavement crack sealing, sewer pipe rehabilitation, and excavation. In developing such tele-operated and machine-vision-assisted systems, trajectory plans are very important tasks for the optimal motions of robots whether their environments are structured or unstructured. This paper presents an optimal trajectory planning algorithm used for a machine-vision-assisted automatic pavement crack sealing system. In this paper, the performance of the proposed optimal trajectory planning algorithm is compared with the greedy trajectory plans, which are used in the previously developed pavement crack sealing systems. The comparison is based on the computational cost vs. the overall gains in crack sealing efficiency. Finally, it is concluded that the proposed algorithm plays an important role in the productivity improvement of the developed automatic pavement crack sealing system.