
Cambridge researchers and industry partners Costain Group have won an award in recognition of their teamwork on a mobile mapping dataset, which has generated positive societal impact.
The team is inspired by the need to extend the life of the nation’s ageing road infrastructure through safe, proactive, automated monitoring, and effective early intervention repairs.
Award citation
The Digital Roads Prosperity Partnership research team is exploring how Digital Twins, smart materials, data science and robotic monitoring can work together to develop a connected physical and digital road infrastructure system. It is a partnership between the University, Costain Group, National Highways, the Department for Transport (DfT), and Digital Roads spin-out company, Didimi.
The team’s efforts were recognised recently at the 2024 IET Excellence and Innovation Awards in the Digital Futures category, presented by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
The Engineers in Society: Digital Futures Team Award was presented in honour of effective teamwork and generating a positive societal impact, including the team’s approach to and how they overcame obstacles through inclusive and collaborative working.
The Award reflects the work carried out in the development of the CAMHighways dataset, a dataset that has been made publicly accessible. Built from mobile mapping data that surveyed over 40km of UK highways, the dataset consists of textured meshes for road assets (including pavements, traffic signs, and road furniture); segmented and classified point clouds; orthomosaics generated from pavement images, defect label annotations and shapefiles; and ground penetrating radar point clouds. The full dataset is available for researchers to access and use.
The Award citation reads: “The team is inspired by the need to extend the life of the nation’s ageing road infrastructure through safe, proactive, automated monitoring, and effective early intervention repairs. This resulted in less repairs and using fewer materials in a smaller window, causing less disruption to traffic flow, and lessening the impact on the environment and road users.”
The research team is led by Professor Ioannis Brilakis, Principal Investigator of the Digital Roads of the Future initiative, and co-investigators Professors Abir Al-Tabbaa and Fumiya Iida. The Cambridge researchers are Dr Damian Palin, Dr Stephen Green and Dr Jerry Xu, working alongside Dr Lilia Potseluyko, Dr Hussameldin Taha, Dr Alix Marie d’Avigneau and Dr N’zebo Richard Anvo from Costain.
“The Digital Roads researchers are well deserving of the IET Engineers in Society: Digital Futures Team Award,” said Professor Brilakis.
“This Award demonstrates how the team is working on leveraging the unprecedented abilities of modern cars for road condition inspection; building the digital capacities for ingesting such vehicle data, automatically translating it into maintenance decisions; and routing those that can be automated to fleets of robotic autonomous repair vehicles to fix the most frequent defect types that make up the majority of road repair.”
This award-winning work has since been published in the journal Advanced Engineering Informatics.
Adapted from a Digital Roads of the Future news article.