2DRoad Weather Camera: the Latest and Greatest in Winter Road Maintenance
The recent release of 2DRoad from test site usage to large scale production deployments is a revolution for road surface status monitoring. 2DRoad’s clean and elegant Nordic design encompasses the latest advancements in the field. In practice, this means much more accurate and contextually interpreted information about the present situation on the roads – namely a very precise detection of black ice – combined with a fast and simple installation and maintenance.
As a world’s first, the 2DRoad measures road surface status on more than 4 000 points; an area that can be as large as 6x6 meters. This contrasts to regular single-point-detection sensors which monitor at most a 30cm diameter area, hardly a representative picture of present road condition.
In addition to measuring a larger area, 2DRoad’s detection quality is also superior and consistently improving. This is thanks to a continuous development and a device-cloud architecture which allows for remote FW updates and classification algorithm fine-tuning.
Furthermore, end-users are presented with contextual road information. They can then decide how to interpret it: for example, they can choose to be alerted about the prevailing road surface status or the most dangerous one, such as black ice. That way, maintenance personnel can be alerted about events that wouldn’t otherwise be detectable, such as icy tracks or snow drifts.
2DRoad is really easy to deploy: “Efficiency is our mission,” says MetSense’s Sales Director, Anders Björk. “2DRoad is a non-intrusive sensor which means a fast installation without road closures or asphalt groove cutting. Also, the device operates standalone – no need for integration into 3rd party data loggers. You can simply hang it up, connect to power, insert a SIM card and you’re good to go. Basically, 2DRoad delivers a more detailed road condition information, thus increasing maintenance efficiency, whilst simultaneously greatly lowering installation complexity.”
First large scale 2DRoad deployment of 3 units took place in December 2019 near the Swedish cities of Uppsala and Enköping.
