ABSTRACT
A large proportion of road roughness measuring equipment used throughout the world today is based on transducers which sense the relative movement between the vehicle body and its rear axle. To meet the need, the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) has developed a highway-speed, road profile measuring system to collect profile data on Australian roads. The ARRB profilometer is an extension of an inertial profilometer concept implemented at General Motors Research Laboratories in the 1960s, and has been designed to measure the left, centre, and right wheeltrack profiles, and estimate wheeltrack rutting, for a travel speed of 80km/h. The accelerometer data are double integrated - to establish the vertical position of displacement transducers with respect to an inertial reference - and combined with the data from the respective displacement transducer to produce wheeltrack profile. The laser-based noncontact displacement transducers are marketed by the Swedish company Selcom AB.
