Mobile Lidar for Road Surface Monitoring: A Case Study of an Integrated AU20 Lidar

Lidar is a new trend in data collecting in surveying in general and in the monitoring field. However, lidar operated on a car solution for road surface data collecting is a quite new platform. The paper is an assessment of using lidar for this kind of purpose. In the study, an AU20 lidar is used on a car platform with three different speeds including 25, 30, and 40 km/h to scan about 3 km of asphalt surface road. The scan data were processed by Copre software using PPK processing mode. The base station is an i90 GNSS receiver. Output data were compared to a conventional method with an ATB4 auto level. The results study indicated the efficiency of AU20 lidar solution with vehicle platform when the time of scan process is around 10 min and about 17 min in total including preparation. The most surprising is the accuracy when comparing the asphalt road surface elevation from point clouds to that from the level method. The maximum differences in elevation are 10, 21, and 19 mm for 25, 30, and 40 km/h speeds, respectively. The standard deviations are 3.0, 6.5, and 7.5 mm for three car speeds.