High-precision positioning of asphalt fleet machines

The European Union has more than 5 million kilometers of paved roads, and 90% of the total road network has an asphalt surface. Continuous monitoring and control of parameters during road construction are significant for the quality and durability of the road. Any sub-optimal operation within the asphalt construction chain will lead to a reduction in road quality, what results inevitably to a decreased life-time. An increasing lifespan, on the contrary, will result in a reduction of cost of road maintenance. Key factors are to optimally manage truck fleets, operate the paver, and steer the compactors. Thereby GNSS technology has been chosen to play a major role. This paper introduces the ASPHALT project, describes the newly multi-frequency GNSS receiver under development, the high precision multi-frequency antenna, the RF frontend, and in particular the baseband; the RTK solution to achieve the high precision position solution, and the EDAS implementation to provide continuous EGNOS correction data stream for position output. First results of RTK solutions will be presented as well as the performance of the multi-frequency GNSS receiver tracking loops. The objective is to meet the requirements of the asphalt road construction in order to increase the quality of roads.