Lincoln Transportation and Utilities has eyes in the sky to decrease road closures

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) — The Lincoln Transportation and Utilities Department is taking advantage of technology to better serve the community.

Its Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Program is using drones to monitor the condition of streets, decreasing closure inconveniences for drivers.

LTU said the program has many benefits across Lincoln and is looking to expand the technology into other parts of the department.

“I think there’s ways for all of them to see efficiencies, whether it’s StarTran looking ahead at a bus route, ahead of something,” said Thomas Shafer, assistant director of transportation. “They’re going to be doing some building of a new hub downtown. As that builds up out of the ground, they’ll be able to do inspections with that, similar to what we are doing in transportation. So some of the stuff we are learning will be able to transfer over to the different divisions.”

LTU says it is reaching higher altitudes with the capability to create 3-D models of their work with GPS accuracy within a centimeter.

“With the drone, we can come back and make a 3-D model of that street now,” program manager Troy Griffin said. “We can twist it and turn it and look at it in all sorts of different angles to see what we need. Then we can keep that data forever. That becomes historical data. It’s not just using it now; it’s using it later on so we can keep track of how the maintenance on that street is going from here on.”

With a TV set up within the program’s vehicle, engineers can also look at what the drone is seeing in real time.

This decreases the amount of time and space crews are taking up for road closures.

Griffin said an aerial inspection of Adams Street between roughly 33rd and 48th Streets was completed within two hours, and only one block was closed at a time.

“To do that normally, manually in the past, we would have had to close that whole section of Adams for two days. We would have had three guys out there evaluating the pavement a piece at a time. Very costly to close down streets like that, not to mention the adverse to the public, not being able to drive through there. ”

The drone can withstand temperatures as low as minus 4 and winds up to 35 miles per hour, but it cannot see through the snow.

It will be baby steps from here on out when adding the drone to other division, LTU says, with a big learning curve to follow each time.

By October, LTU will be using an infrared camera. It can detect cement cracks that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye.

Eventually crews say it will help them see where a street is going to need a repair before the conditions reach that point, potentially preventing potholes before they happen.