Nottinghamshire revolutionises data collection

15 January 2008, 2:29pm

Exciting innovative digital surveying for collecting highway inventory data has proved to be a success with Nottinghamshire County Council. Using Yotta DCL's groundbreaking Nano technology with a high-resolution 360-degree photographic survey, Nottinghamshire is able to map its highway inventory pixel-by-pixel giving a clear true picture of its assets. The additional benefits of Yotta DCL's unique digital asset collection survey are speed, accuracy and lower costs.

Nottinghamshire is a typical semi-rural authority with approximately 4000km of highway. The majority of the roads are unclassified. This mix of roads presents many challenges for asset collection. A total of 250km of A, B and C roads were surveyed as a trial with Yotta DCL's geospatial video technique (Geovideo) that works in conjunction with the company's Nano software.

The need for local authorities to know exactly what their highway assets comprise, their location and their condition is being driven by Central Government. Bernard Younger, Service Head (Highway Assets), Nottinghamshire County Council, says: “Asset management and valuation is becoming an important focus for local authorities. However, asset collection is usually an expensive exercise but Yotta DCL is offering a new way to do this which is very interesting. We are very excited by this new surveying technique. It is bringing asset collection and inventory management to a completely new dimension.”

The Yotta DCL survey team uses a specially designed and developed vehicle equipped with six automated cameras that provide a full street-level view of the highway. The cameras take a photograph every 2 metres as the vehicle drives along, with the precise position of each item recorded by GPS. These photographs are processed by the Nano software. The data is then evaluated and analysed pixel-by-pixel to give a highly accurate view of each inventory item captured on the journey.

Traditional asset collection surveys are performed by surveyors walking the highways and are therefore dependant on each surveyors performance and experience. This is a slow process averaging about 2km a day and can produce variable results. Moreover manual surveys are time consuming and expensive to perform. An alternative is to manually review the video footage taken while a survey vehicle drives along the highway. This too is dependent on the person reviewing the video and can produce variable results.

With its unique service, Yotta DCL has removed the element of human inaccuracy, sped up the survey process by 100 times as a whole and reduced the cost of asset collection. The added benefit of the automated, digital technique is that the data can be input to the Pavement Management System without further keying in of information.

“We are very impressed with the results presented by Yotta DCL. We have reviewed the data and would advocate this method of surveying. The additional benefit of having this capture data is that we can return to it whenever we want. Yotta DCL's team has broken new ground with this technology and we are extremely pleased with the results of the trial,” concludes Bernard Younger.

www.yotta.tv
Enquiries to David Lowe, Yotta DCL, +44 (0)1865 261 826, david.lowe@yotta.tv

The Marketing Edge