3D scanning technique for obtaining road surface and its applications

A military vehicle is tested on the standard road surface, which is constructed to be similar to a cross country road surface, in order to evaluate its dynamic performance. The road profile can be changed slowly and continuously by erosion and vehicle movements so that the change might be a large effect on the vehicle performance tests. Therefore, it is necessary to reconstruct and reshape the road surface regularly for the accuracy of the vehicle tests. In this work, the road surface has been obtained by a high-resolution 3D scanner and has been used for extracting road profiles along a direction of travel. Based on the road profile, PSD (Power Spectral Density) has been calculated to evaluate the quality of the road surface. Here, the comparison of two road profiles with different spatial resolutions showed that PSD can be a useful tool indicating the quality of roads. In addition, the generated road surface has been applied to MBD (Multi-Body Dynamics) simulations for obtaining a vehicle’s performance numerically.