Digital Roads Prosperity Partnership
The Digital Roads Prosperity Partnership (DR) is a business-led £8.6m research project, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The project is a partnership between Costain Group, National Highways and the University of Cambridge. In January 2024 the original 3 partners were joined by the Department for Transport and Digital Roads spinout company, Didimi.
Digital Roads works alongside the FUTUREROADS programme, a £5.9m programme supported by EU MSCA COFUND, with 26 experienced researcher fellowships over 60 months.
Digital Roads is leading the way in the digital revolution of our vital road network, a once-in-a-century transformation to make roads safer and greener. The research explores how Digital Twins, smart materials, data science and robotic monitoring work together to develop a connected physical and digital road infrastructure system. The vision is to deliver resilient roads that can measure and monitor their own performance over time, to make roads safer and greener.
The Prosperity Partnership agreement was signed on 01 October 2021 with the project start date of 01 April 2022. The project has been granted a 1-year No Cost Extension by the EPSRC, with the new project end date of 31 March 2028.
The Digital Roads Platform
The video below describes the Digital Roads research ambition. To find out more about our research, dip in here, Research or contact our Research Team.
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Digital Roads Research
The CAMHighways dataset has been built from mobile mapping data that surveyed over 40km of UK Highways.
The dataset consists of textured meshes for road assets (including the pavement, traffic signs and road furniture), segmented and classified point clouds, orthomosaics generated from pavement images, defect label annotations and shapefiles, and ground penetrating radar point clouds. All modalities are georeferenced and can be integrated into game engines and/or GIS software.
The Digital Roads dataset has been made publicly available to help further investigation into the management of our national infrastructure and has been made available to the public. For more information click here.
RoadGP is a browser-based tool that guides users through a step-by-step process to diagnose road defects. By entering basic road information and selecting any observed issues, the tool suggests likely causes and offers potential repair strategies.
The Autonomous Maintenance Plant (AMP), a digitally enabled and semi-autonomous highway maintenance system developed within the Digital Roads Prosperity Partnership. The AMP combines robotic automation, intelligent control, digital sensing, and low-carbon repair technologies to support more efficient road maintenance operations, combined with enhanced repair materials developed by the Digital Roads Materials research team.
Events
Digital Roads Events
Our second Annual Review was held on 13th November 2024 and you can find out more about the event here:
Digital Roads of the Future Annual Review
You can download the Book of Abstracts created for the event to find out about the work happening across the DRF Initiative.
After the Annual Review, the Initiative held our inaugural debate in the Cambridge Union historic Debate Chamber. The motion under debate was Road Infrastructure: this house believes that Digitalisation is the most effective pathway to Net-zero, click through to watch a recording of the debate via YouTube.
Our first Annual Review was held on 8th September 2023, you can find more about the event here: Digital Roads Annual Review 2023.
You can also download our short pamphlet to find out more about the challenges, vision and approach to research that Digital Roads is taking as well as the progress achieved in our first year. Click to download pdf