On November 14 the Intelliway Consortium came together at the Forest Research Center Gotha in Thuringia. The project partners presented the results of the research project Intelliway: “Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance for Forest Roads”. It was a pleasure to see how far we’ve advanced the state of the art in forest road management together. Many interesting results were presented:
- the KWF’s new standard for road condition classification in Germany (see fact sheet in German)
- various algorithms to predict future road maintenance needs based on timber transport models, weather, et cetera
- INTEND’s WIS 2.0 road information system for forestries
- an app from eEntwicklung.net to support manual road condition classification
- the complex CONTURA prototype which measures the road surface with laser scanning
- our new Road Scanner 3.0 that strikes the perfect balance between operating cost and road classification power
- and more
Over the course of the Intelliway project we at iFOS put a lot of work and ingenuity into the development of our new and improved Road Scanner 3.0. We overhauled the entire hardware and software and added two more ultrasound sensors to improve detection of wheel ruts. As always, foresters can simply mount the Road Scanner 3.0 on the trailer hitch of their car and let it monitor the road conditions while they are on the move checking on forest health and forestry operations.
While the Intelliway project comes to a close, participants of the final discussion agreed that this line of development needs to continue since systematic road condition monitoring is essential for maintaining forest roads cost-effectively. Representatives of various state forestries expressed an interest in integrating the Road Scanner 3 into their regular operations.
Hence, we’re not done with road condition monitoring at all. In the R&D project CO₂For-IT we’re developing a Road Scan Box that can be mounted on logging trucks. We’re also in negotiations with several stakeholders to continue with large scale trials of the Road Scanner 3 in state forestries. Over the next years we plan to bring objective road condition monitoring and the associated cost-savings to forest road networks across Germany and beyond.