Application of RFID and point laser systems in highway inspection

The term intelligent transportation system (ITS) refers to efforts to add information and communication technologies to transportation infrastructure and vehicles in order to increase highway maintenance efficiency, decrease labor costs and manage factors and information that are difficult to monitor frequently. This dissertation focuses on three different technologies which are widely used in ITS applications, and thoroughly discusses ITS principles and physics. The three technologies are printed antenna design, multi-task data acquisition system design and algorithm design. Although the theoretical bases of these technologies vary greatly, for instance, from antenna design, operating system, microprocessor to numerical analysis and digital signal processing, they are applied to two specific major applications. One is a passive radio frequency identification (RFID)-based highway reference marker locating system. The other is a portable inertial profiling system.;In the first application, a high speed (up to 60 mph) vehicle-mounted long range passive RFID system, was developed to locate highway reference markers by analyzing global positioning system (GPS) and distance measurement instrument (DM1) data simultaneously. The system consists of two parts: hardware and software. The hardware includes a RFID reader, high-gain reader antenna and a passive tag. Most of the hardware design work is on the tag side, especially on the tag's printed antenna design. The software basically is a Windows-based multi-task data collection system which can collect the GPS, DM1 and RFID data, then process and display them simultaneously. The read range of this system can reach up to 40 feet and the locating resolution can be less than 13 feet. The life span of the whole system can be up to 10 years and the cost of each RFID tag is less than ;In the second application, a portable profiling system was developed, which is an embedded system based on Texas Instrument's TMS320F2812 digital signal processor. The system can collect the accelerometer sensor and optical laser sensor data simultaneously. Two data collection channels are coordinated by a wireless DMI sensor which can generate a sampling pulse every regular interval, such as 20mm. The system can calculate the profile of a highway pavement in real-time. This system is strictly a distance-based sampling system no matter how much vehicle speed varies. The profiling data can be sent to an upper host computer via an advance reduced instruction set machine (ARM) based interface board which is also an embedded system. An ARM board finally sends the data to the upper host computer to save data or do further processing. A DSP adaptable real-time profiling algorithm was developed and proved to be practicable and reliable under high speed (up to 60 mph) conditions. It is also the first high-speed portable profiling system in the world.