The VOTERS (Versatile Onboard Traffic-Embedded Roaming Sensors) project provides a framework to complement periodical localized inspections of roadways and bridge decks with continuous network-wide health monitoring. Utilizing traffic-embedded Vehicles Of Opportunity (VOOs) roaming through daily traffic eliminates hazardous, congestion-prone work zones, that are typically set up to gather these critical inspection data sets. It also provides maintenance decision makers and researchers with a temporal and spatial data set not available in roadway and bridge deck inspection today.
Realizing a Roaming Multi-Modal Multi-Sensor System poses nice challenges for the distributed embedded real-time system design. Large amounts of data need to be processed, heterogenous processing nodes need to communicate with each other, strict time synchronization is necessary to correlate data from separate sensors and finally sensor fusion is needed to construct a coherent view merging the data from separate sensors.