Making infrastructure safer
with efficient road surface inspection technology

Efficient road surface monitoring

Reducing the maintenance burden

Although the social infrastructure which underpins economic activities and the daily life of the local community is deteriorating with time, there are not enough organizations and engineers to maintain it. Ricoh is developing a road surface monitoring system as a solution to reduce the burden of maintaining the roads that are such an integral part of daily life.
There are problems involved with the large specialized vehicles currently being used to survey road surfaces; for example, they cannot enter residential streets. The road surface monitoring system being developed by Ricoh is a compact one consisting only of a number of Ricoh's stereo cameras. It can be mounted on a regular motor car, making it possible to survey residential streets easily Man-hours can also be dramatically reduced by automating the work process, from the filming to the drawing up of survey results. We are aiming to reduce the survey workload and raise the quality of the work produced.

Solving the problem of insufficient manpower

Currently much of the inspection work on social infrastructure is done manually by way of visual inspection. A lack of manpower leads to less frequent inspections and sometimes to a drop in quality. Our road surface monitoring system has greatly boosted the efficiency and accuracy of the surveys by replacing the manual evaluation process that has been used up until now with an AI machine learning based model. In addition, it is possible to record the road surface conditions learned from the survey on maps, thus giving a visible form to the characteristics of the road surfaces and enabling swifter and more efficient decision making.
Ricoh is working on infrastructure maintenance solutions that tackle issues from the angle of both function and cost. Our aim is to create a safer and more pleasant environment for the community.

R&D

Road surface monitoring system

Data from Ricoh's stereo cameras allows to measure the following three factors: road crack rate, road crack depth and flatness

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Making infrastructure safer with efficient road surface inspection technology