Path Planning for Machine Vision Assisted, Teleoperated Pavement Crack Sealer

Abstract

During the last few years, several teleoperated and machine-vision-assisted systems have been developed in construction and maintenance areas such as pavement crack sealing, sewer pipe rehabilitation, excavation, surface finishing, and materials handling. This paper presents a path-planning algorithm used for a machine-vision-assisted automatic pavement crack sealing system. In general, path planning is an important task for optimal motion of a robot whether its environment is structured or unstructured. Manual path planning is not always possible or desirable. A simple greedy path algorithm is utilized for optimal motion of the automated pavement crack sealer. Some unique and broadly applicable computational tools and data structures are required to implement the algorithm in a digital image domain. These components are described, then the performance of the algorithm is compared with the implicit manual path plans of system operators. The comparison is based on computational cost versus overall gains in crack-sealing-process efficiency. Applications of this work in teleoperation, graphical control, and other infrastructure maintenance areas are also suggested.