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Pavement rutting is a critical measure of road condition. Severe rutting indicates road structure deformation and exposes drivers to hazards, especially when it holds rainwater. The Pavement Management Information System requires ruts to be measured regularly for pavement condition score calculation. In the past few decades, a number of automated rut-measurement devices have been developed and used for highway speed data collection. However, all these devices exhibit limitations on measuring ground truth in practice. This paper introduces a high-speed true three-dimensional (3D) pavement surface measurement tool that can produce accurate rut data at highway speeds. Network-level data collections were conducted and the results analyzed to evaluate and verify the system.

Pavement texture is an important indicator of road serviceability. Pavement texture is directly linked to pavement and tire skid resistance and to traffic safety for the public. Therefore, most transportation agencies require texture data for their pavement management information systems. Current methods for measuring pavement texture that use high-speed distance sensors or three-dimensional line scan devices have shown limitations for data stability. Problems caused by vehicle vibration, bad data from optical sensors, and, most important, speed dependency related to the sensor sampling time or exposure time either make the texture results unreliable or reveal noticeable errors. The influence of speed on network-level texture data collection was studied, and a highspeed, high-precision three-dimensional texture system was developed. The experiment confirmed that improper selection of a sensor with large exposure time would result in speed dependency on measured texture data. Because the system developed in the study adopted a very small exposure time for each sampling, it could produce accurate texture data that are largely independent of vehicle speed.