Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Virtual Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance Assessment of Curb Ramps Using Lidar Point Clouds: A Framework to Simulate Digital Inclinometers for Slope Measurements

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/x059cg616

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  • A curb ramp is an indispensable ramp system in the transportation network that provides a transition between a sidewalk and a roadway. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that the design, construction, and maintenance of curb ramps meet the ADA standards. However, many existing curb ramps are noncompliant, as achieving high accuracy and consistency with the current inspection procedure is challenging owing to the subjectivities and uncertainties of the field survey, especially for slope measurements with a digital inclinometer. Light detection and ranging (lidar), or three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning, is one of the most efficient techniques to collect high-accuracy and high-resolution 3D geospatial data. It has also been proven to have the potential and advantages to assess the ADA compliance of curb ramps in a virtual environment to help guide and improve field practice. However, the accuracy of such evaluation still needs to be assessed because most existing studies did not take into consideration the field inspection process, local variation of the slope measurement, and physical principle of the instrument. In this paper, a simulation framework of virtual ADA compliance inspection for curb ramps using terrestrial laser scanning data is proposed. In this research, various physical considerations for the digital inclinometer were integrated in the simulation, and four methods were implemented: surface normal, linear regression, linear regression considering observation scales, and the touching points to simulate the slope measurement process of the digital inclinometer. In the experiment, the methods were compared with each other, and the parameters were optimized through rigorous accuracy assessments. The accuracy and effectiveness of the simulation were demonstrated when the root mean square error for the mean slope of a curb ramp is 0.14%, which is on par with the accuracy of the instrument tested in this study. In the use case analysis, the proposed framework was further applied to analyze the impact of the sample interval during the slope measurement in a field inspection.
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  • This study was funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans).
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  • Pending Publication
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  • 2022-09-20 to 2023-04-21

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