Driverless road-marking Machines: Ma(r)king the Way towards the Future of Mobility

TL;DR

This paper explores how teleoperated road-marking machines can enhance road safety, traffic management, and infrastructure quality for automated driving, by developing and validating a functional system overview.

Contribution

It presents a novel teleoperation-based system for road-marking machines, including hardware and software integration, validated through experiments to serve as a baseline for future development.

Findings

Validated a functional system overview with an actual road-marking machine

Developed different teleoperation operation modes

Demonstrated potential benefits for road safety and efficiency

Abstract

Driverless road maintenance could potentially be highly beneficial to all its stakeholders, with the key goals being increased safety for all road participants, more efficient traffic management, and reduced road maintenance costs such that the standard of the road infrastructure is sufficient for it to be used in Automated Driving (AD). This paper addresses how the current state of technology could be expanded to reach those goals. Within the project 'System for Teleoperated Road-marking' (SToRM), using the road-marking machine as the system, different operation modes based on teleoperation were discussed and developed. Furthermore, a functional system overview considering both hardware and software elements was experimentally validated with an actual road-marking machine and should serve as a baseline for future efforts in this and similar areas.