Digital Roads publish papers on autonomous road repair

5 January 2026 2 min read

The Digital Roads project has started the new year with two new publications on the autonomous repair of roads in the UK. The publications come from the Smart Materials, with Academic lead Prof Abir Al-tabbaa,  and Automation & Robotics, with Academic lead Prof Fumiya Iida.

High-level system architecture diagram for the autonomous highway maintenance vehicle, illustrating the sensing, perception, planning, control, and actuation modules. These modules interact with each other, the environment, a digital twin, and a human ope

The first paper,Autonomous Maintenance of Highway Pavements: A Framework Aiming toward Implementation, has been published in the ASCE's Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, presenting a systematic literature review of autonomous pavement maintenance and analysis of data sets on manual pavement maintenancethe team was able to develop a framework for automous pavement repair.

The framework includes:

  1. critical tasks of self–driving and the autonomous inspection and repair of cracks and small potholes;
  2. system architecture spanning sensing, perception and localization, planning, control, actuation, and communication for executing these tasks; and
  3. end-to-end operational workflow linking the tasks.

Future challenges and opportunities are discussed, including multimodal perception, precision material deposition, whole-life costings, updated standards, and workforce considerations.

Congratulations to digital roads researhers, Dr Damian Palin, Samuel Schaefer, Dr Alix Marie d’Avigneau, Dr Jie Xu, Dr Georgios M. Hadjidemetriou and to investigators, Michael Ambrose (Turner & Townsend, former National Highways), Prof Abir Al-Tabbaa, Prof Fumiya Iida, Prof Ioannis Brilakis and  Dr Thomas George Thuruthel

The second paper, Microfibre-reinforced cementitious materials for preventive concrete pavement crack repair: Balancing extrusion-based crack-filling with mechanical performance published in Cement and Concrete Composites describes the research undertaken by the team into creating a more advanced repair material for use by our Autonomous Repair Plant, designed to repair early damage to our roads, a real step in the prevention of potholes. Congratulations to Dr Damian Palin and Dr Jie Xu on the paper. 

Abstract

Preventive repair of cracked concrete pavements requires materials that balance effective extrusion and crack-filling with high mechanical performance. Here, we present a polyvinyl alcohol microfibre (PVAF)-reinforced commercial belitic calcium sulphoaluminate mortar, engineered with this balance. A fresh mix of the mortar plus 1 % (w/w) of a water reducer and up to 0.6 % (v/v) of short (∼1–2 mm) PVAF could be extruded and fill cracks 6 mm wide. Cracked concrete specimens repaired with this material under flexural loading exhibited a 30 % increase in ultimate strength and twice the modulus, strain at failure, toughness and residual strength compared to plain RS. Under slant shear loading, repaired specimens demonstrated a modest increase in slant shear strength. These enhancements are attributed to fibre-induced crack bridging within the repair materials and reduced stress concentration at the repair interfaces. To accelerate material development, we implemented a rapid real-to-simulation workflow that reduced the crack-filling screening time for a material from several hours to less than 1 h.