Digital Road Profile Using Kinematic GPS

A Digital Road Profile (DRP) is a digital representation of road surface topography or terrain in the longitudinal direction. The need for accurate DRP is vital in two stages; before the road construction starts and after the road construction finished where the verification of its geometrical characteristics is essential for engineering safety purposes. Classical surveying techniques are traditionally used for the DRP generation with limitation of high-cost and time-waste. Kinematic DGPS or Real Time Kinematic DGPS positioning can provide accurate enough results for such application. This paper presents an assessment study of using kinematic GPS technique for DRP generation comparing with classical survey in south Egypt. The results shows that, vehicle-GPS system used in combination with post processing kinematic DGPS gave satisfactory accuracy for nearly all points for a distance of nearly 2 km. with max. and min. difference not more than 7.7 cm, a mean value of 0.10 cm and a Root Mean Square RMS value of 4.11 cm.