Exploring the A12 in virtual reality

As Ioannis was explaining earlier, he’s working on a system that will harness real-time data collected by cars to produce a “digital twin” of the road network, complete with all of its potholes and other imperfections. The idea being, of course, that the highways agencies responsible for making repairs know where to focus their efforts and even, as we’ll hear in a moment, where to deploy autonomous robotic repair vehicles to fix problems at the earliest stage before they become a nuisance.

So what might this digital twin look like?

These computerised replicas of the physical world can allow workers to actually - in virtual reality - walk along sections of roads and inspect the surface and any defects. They’ve got a mock-up of the system in operation. James got strapped in to take a wander down a section of a major A road near Colchester…

James - I've been very lucky to be shown a demonstration of what the data collecting capabilities of the cars on our roads are able to produce in the virtual world. So if I can get you to imagine, I've put on a VR headset, I'm in something akin to a giant baby walker, and beneath my feet are sensors so that when I move my feet along the surface of them, I'm moving my character in this virtual world. The VR headset is giving me the capability of looking around and observing my surroundings. In this particular demonstration, I'm on a stretch of the A12 where there are a number of points of data interesting to National highways, I expect. There's information about a pothole that's formed in this part of the road, road signs have been rendered in for me. As I look around and explore this virtual reality, I'm starting to get to grips with what the 'sensors on wheels,' as they've been described to us, are actually able to give the companies for their repair purposes, et cetera. I can run around without getting run over as well. There's no cars on the road, which is a blessing to be honest, because I don't think I'd survive long out here.

James - The technology's back in the hands of the professionals, I'm glad to say.

Lilia - I'm Dr Lilia Potseluyko. I'm an industrial research fellow in digital twins. This is the data set collected from a section of the A12 road. What we are hoping to achieve in the future is for traffic maintenance professionals to be able to get this data real time and be able to use it to predict what would happen next and which section of road to prioritise for repair.

James - The virtual reality section of the A12 we are wandering around in today. Where's the data come from exactly to build this digital twin?

Lilia - So currently it's been collected by a contractor to National Highways.

James - So the idea will be that we'll be getting more data from the actual sensors on the cars that's being uploaded in vast quantities as we were hearing about earlier?

Lilia - Yes. From this data we could get the best use to create the most realistic virtual environment that we can. What we are planning to achieve is for software to be able to create a semantic segmentation of the data so the traffic officers don't need to search for the defects themselves on the road. The software will be able to identify it for them.