Current Project
DIGITAL ROADS PROSPERITY PARTNERSHIP
April 2022 – March 2027
EPSRC, Costain, National Highways, £8,652,164
The Digital Roads Prosperity Partnership (DR) is a business-led £8.6m research project, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The programme is part of the overall Digital Roads of the Future initiative, involving Cambridge engineers in partnership with National Highways, and the construction and engineering company, Costain. It will work alongside the FUTUREROADS programme, a £5.9m programme supported by EU MSCA COFUND, offering 27 experienced researcher fellowships over 60 months.
Digital Roads is leading the way in the digital revolution of our vital road network, a once-in-a-century transformation to make roads safer and greener. The research will explore how Digital Twins, smart materials, data science and robotic monitoring can work together to develop a connected physical and digital road infrastructure system. The vision is to deliver resilient roads that can measure and monitor their own performance over time, to make roads safer and greener.
By 2030, the Digital Roads team aims to develop outcomes to a commercial stage and to follow the same development journey for other road assets such as bridges and tunnels, followed by the entire strategic road network by 2040.
FUTUREROADS: FUTURE ROADS FELLOWSHIPS
October 2021 – September 2026
European Commission, H2020, MSCA £5,226,406
Future Roads Fellowships (FUTUREROADS) is a Fellowship Programme intended to foster excellence in experienced researchers' training, mobility and career development in advanced research into the digital and sustainable transformation of road networks.
Running over 5 years, the £5.9m project offers 27 fellowships, each lasting for 36 months, in 3 recruitment rounds focusing primarily in 5 areas:
- Digital twins
- Smart materials
- Data science
- Automation and robotics
- Sustainability solutions
Fellows benefit from international, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary research training as well as transnational and cross-sectoral mobility. The programme allows applicants to have the freedom to develop their own ideas with access to excellent facilities.
It operates in line with the principles set out in the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers, so spreading the best practices of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA).
A further aim is to establish a multidisciplinary training platform to strengthen researchers’ capabilities so they can work anywhere in Europe, and thus attract researchers from around the world to the continent.
SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION OF REALITY CAPTURE DATA FOR GENERATING DIGITAL TWINS OF EXISTING ROADS
March 2021 - March 2026
EPRSC & Ordinance Survey, £138,825
OMICRON Towards a more automated and optimised maintenance, renewal, and upgrade of roads by means of robotised technologies and intelligent decision support tools
May 2021 - October 2024
European Commission, H2020, £4,559,449
OMICRON is a technology-focused project, that combines the most modern automatized tools in a way that can be adapted and applied to specific local requirements. These technologies together will be developed to create an Intelligent Road Asset Management Platform. The platform has four main focus areas:
- Digital maintenance technologies
- Predictive maintenance
- Smart construction
- Smart intervention and maintenance
OMICRON offers a complete solution for the transition to automatized road network construction, inspection and maintenance. This is ensured by our consortium where, among 16 partners, we count with research centres, universities, road constructors, robot engineers, bridge architects and civil engineering companies, just to name a few.
Past Project
BRIDGE STRIKE
June 2013 – December 2013
London Underground, London, UK & Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction (CUED) Grant #59570, £25,200
This project aims were to provide early, reliable warning and notification of bridge strikes using digital video and accelerometers. The system will use digital video and advanced computer vision algorithms to attempt to determine the height of approaching vehicles using a single camera. The accelerometers will be used to determine whether or not over-height approaching vehicles actually hit the bridge, and could provide an indication of a bridge strike to London Underground. If the system could be shown to reliably generate a warning in advance of an impending bridge strike there is the potential to save bridge owners and haulage companies (or their insurers) large sums of money by preventing bridge strikes from occurring in the first place. The project was funded by Transport for London (TfL) and Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC).
Researcher: Bella Nguyen