Contour-guided zigzag path planning for the automation of pothole spray repair based on the depth image.

Current pavement pothole repair technology relies heavily on human experience and manual operation. To automate the repair process of pavement pothole spraying repair, a contour-guided zigzag path planning method based on depth image was proposed in this paper, including pothole slicing and slice repair path planning. In the aspect of pothole slicing, a double flood filling method was proposed to ensure the repair strategy from bottom to up under the priority of region by region, while in the aspect of slice path planning, a contour-guided round-trip repair path planning method was proposed to arrange the repair trajectory homogeneously in the pothole without exceeding its irregular boundary. The path planning results showed that the average spacing error of four kinds of common potholes with different shapes was 7.31%, the average time of the whole path planning process was 1.571 s, the average relative difference of the mean square error was only 1.83 mm, which indicated that the proposed method could obtain high path planning accuracy and fast path planning speed. The results demonstrated that the proposed contour-guided zigzag path planning method based on depth image could be applied to the automatic spraying repair of different potholes with convex or concave contours and achieve good pavement repair flatness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]