The overall objective of this project is the development of a control system for road maintenance trucks that will automate the dispensing of both tar and stone chips onto roads.
The control system should have the capability to monitor and control the rate of flow and area covered of dispensed tar and stone chips, along with monitoring additional information such as status of all jets, shoots and sensors, truck speed via Radar sensing and current position via GPS tracking. Such monitoring will be available locally in the vehicle cab and remotely via a remote monitoring portal.
It is proposed that a series of control modules will be developed to enable the implementation of specific vehicular adaptation technologies, and these will be developed for use on a number of target vehicles, which include:
- Basic Tar Spray Truck
- Basic Chip Truck
- Advanced Combi (Tar/Chip) Truck
Projected key outcomes
- Design and development of generic modules to control the printer, GPS, radar features to assist the system functionality as well as the design and development of the data transferring from the controller to the server
- Truck automation for tar spraying and stone chips spreading
- Design and development of the web portal which display information from the trucks
- Establish remote support of clients