Published August 13th, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran
Penguin Road Patrol
Meet the penguin road patrol…
Until then the survey, which covers half of the state’s 22,000-km road network each year, had been done by a two-man team driving at 20kmph, with the driver calling out the defects and the passenger jotting things down. It was an arduous procedure that took a long time, posed dangers to other traffic and pretty expensive to boot.
Viner used a video camera and an Apple Macintosh to convince VicRoads that video footage would provide pictures of sufficient resolution for VicRoads to be able to diagnose things such as ride comfort, rutting, and stone texture.
What Viner and his team have ended up with today is a system that uses Linux to run five video cameras from the same kind of van used as an ambulance. It is all done at a speed ranging from 80kmph to 100kmph. The cost of the annual survey has, in the process, fallen from $1.2 million to $850,000. And the system which was devised has so far generated about 1.3 terabytes of video footage with few problems.