Dr Xiang WANG

Research Interests

Dr Xiang Wang’s research interests include the development and application of sensor and sensing techniques for non-destructive testing and structural health monitoring with advanced signal processing methods.

Strategic Themes

1. Road surface condition monitoring
2. Sensor technology
3. Artifical intelligence

Research Project

Existing road monitoring devices use specialized sensing technologies for detecting damage or bulk properties. However, they are expensive to develop, has low update rate and is limited in their sensing capabilities. This project aims to use non-conventional readily available sensors for road condition monitoring. For instance, using IMUs and traction information in autonomous cars for detecting onset of aquaplaning.

Title: Artificial intelligence assistant autonomous-vehicle-mounted sensors based road surface condition monitoring system

Theme:

Automation and Robotics

Abstract:

Road transportation is an important component of transportation. Numerous roads to be monitored are a challenge for the management by the authorities. Untimely road maintenance endangers the safety of drivers and vehicles. Low-cost and high-efficiency Road Surface Monitoring (RSM) becomes an important target for future roads. Conventional RSM systems have the disadvantages of high costs and difficulty to be improved. 

Automated driving shows potential for future road transportation. Will autonomous vehicles mounted with non-conventional sensors monitoring roads be a future RSM solution? This research will develop a low-cost RSM system mainly based on autonomous-vehicle-mounted Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) sensors.  

Currently, the research is focusing on monitoring the international roughness index by civilian vehicles with sensors mounted on the vehicles. The international roughness index is a key index related to the performance of the pavement. One research journal paper and one conference paper are written with the scope of road surface monitoring of the international roughness index by sensors mounted on civilian vehicles. The other index that will be focused on is the friction of the pavement. The friction measurement will be used for the analysis of the detection of the onset of aquaplaning of the vehicles. Tires are the components of a vehicle that directly contact the road surfaces. The unevenness of the road surface and the friction of the road surface can be shown by the status of the tires. A tire sensor for road surface monitoring is developing based on optical methods to analyse the road surface details and relate the measured information for the road surface parameters. 

Alignment with SDG:  

SDG Target 3.6 - halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents by 2030 

The starting and expected end TRL levels: 

TRL Level 1 (Starting): Basic Technology Research 

TRL Level 3 (Expected): Analytical and experimental proof-of-concept 

Biography

Dr Xiang Wang obtained his PhD at Delft University of Technology with his PhD thesis on Development of Distributed Fibre Optic Sensing for Structural Health Monitoring. During his PhD research, he published 4 journal papers on the topic of sensors and sensing methods for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), 3 international conference papers and 1 invited article for the magazine of PhotonicsNL. He was the winner of many international events. Before he was appointed as the Marie Curie Fellow at the Future Roads project at the University of Cambridge, he was appointed as a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) at the non-destructive testing laboratory at the Delft University of Technology and was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow funded by Research Talent Hub for Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) at the department of electronic and information engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.