A Thermal-Based Technology for Roller Path Tracking and Mapping in Pavement Compaction Operations

Compaction is one of the most important phases in construction of asphalt concrete (AC) pavements, as it directly affects the density and thereby the performance of pavements. This paper proposed a thermal-based compaction technology for real-time roller path tracking and mapping in pavement compaction operations, based on which roller operators can better control their compaction quality. In the proposed method, the incremental change of a roller position in a short interval was decomposed into two motion components (i.e., the change in heading direction and the linear translation). The global position of the roller was then recovered by chaining the frame-by-frame motion in terms of their changes. Two sets of experimental data from different pavement construction sites were used to test the performance of the proposed technology. The results showed that the developed technology is a promising alternative to the current GPS-based intelligent compaction (IC) in pavement compaction operations.