Road Profiling has become a crucial practice for transportation departments throughout the world. US State DOT's (Departments of Transportation) are responsible for gathering statistical information on road surfaces including the longitudinal profile, mactrotextures, microtextures and roughness to determine coefficients of friction. The measuring tasks are especially challenging for most lasers because road surfaces present many dynamically-changing targets including tarmac, concrete, yellow striping, white striping, etc. Acuity developed special lasers to maintain a consistent sampling rate over varying targets. To learn more about the field of road profiling, you may download the Acuity white paper on Road Profiling ( PDF 291KB) or download the Little Book of Road Profiling by UMTRI.

Acuity has worked with developers of road profiling equipment to produce versions of the AR600 for use as primary sensors for inertial profilers meeting ASTM Class 1 standards. The result is an AR600 with optics, electronics, and signal processing algorithms specifically for road profiling. Optics, electronics, and signal processing algorithms have been optimized for profiling. The result is an extremely accurate, cost-effective sensor for all surface types, vehicle speeds, and vibration, sunlight, and temperature conditions encountered in profilometry applications. As of March 2003 over a dozen Acuity road profiling sensors have been in service for more than a year with no field service required.

Ames Engineering is a user of Acuity laser products for their lightweight and high speed profilers. They are active in pavement and concrete profiling technologies for domestic and international clients.

The photo to the left is courtesy of Translogy, Inc. A vehicle was retrofitted with an AR600 road profiling laser to test the smoothness of pavement.

Other customers of Acuity products include the Federal Highway Administration, the Texas Department of Transportation, CALTRANS and the University of Texas at Arlington.

The University of Texas performs transverse road profiling using Acuity's laser line scanner. This device is used by the Texas Department of Transportation's data collection vehicles.