# BIZON-UGV for Airport Pavement Testing: Mechanics and Control
## 1 Introduction  
The use of autonomous robotic systems such as autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in the military world has increased, especially by air and land forces. UGVs integrate modern technology into civil or military units by sensing the environment through remote management or sensor systems and performing basic tasks within the scope of the requirements. Autonomous UGVs, available in different sizes and configurations for various needs, have gained qualities that can fulfill many tasks. Engineers are still planning to target the airport industry as a commercial market for unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) systems. Hence, the area of interest is the airport industry and airport technology (e.g., surface imaging, defect detection, pavement testing, surface assessment, etc. ); the incorporation of new, hi-tech platforms is constantly growing in civil and military engineering research [1; 2; 3]. The book in [1] only introduces, in a timely fashion, the latest advances and developments in robotics based on their significance and quality, but [2] presents the application of civil autonomous vehicle technology to develop a demonstration of UGVs for the Spanish Army, including the background, architecture, and first field tests. The work in [3] focuses on a unified motion control strategy dedicated to the waypoint following task, realized by a differentially driven robot. The vehicle is assumed to move with limited velocities and accelerations to reduce excessive slip and skid effects. In the context of airport technology, the market related to mobile platforms,especially those dedicated to pavement testing and surface assessment [4; 5], is important. Here, the application of the motion planning methods to different pavement inspection tasks, including the illustration of pavement processes, is presented and widely described. Airport UGVs should continuously ensure a precise assessment of the load-bearing capacity of natural airport surfaces in a continuous way. This specific type of surface occurs at airports and airstrips for private, civil, and military use [6; 7]. Routine inspection and maintenance of pavement surfaces are of the utmost importance, especially for runway strips designed for aircraft takeoff and landing at significantly higher speeds. Natural airport surfaces share one goal: minimizing the negative impacts when an aircraft uses an Airport Functional Element (AFE). Therefore, there is an urgent need to design and implement an autonomous, unmanned measuring device that will continuously determine the load capacity of natural airport surfaces and, thus, increase the safety of flight operations [8]. A thorough review of some of the existing strategies for pothole detection along highways was conducted by [9; 10]. There are four types of sensor modalities, vibration-based, vision-based, thermography-based, and LiDAR-based, than can acquire data for pavement inspection. In the case of vibration-based methods, the authors of [11] developed specialized data acquisition hardware mounted on a vehicle to conduct the preliminary evaluation of pavement conditions related to potential cracks along pavement surfaces. Additionally, in [12], researchers developed a Pothole Patrol method for detecting and reporting the surface conditions of runways. In the vision-based area for pothole detection, [13] proposed an unsupervised vision-based method with no additional filtering or training requirements. Moreover, the authors of [14] proposed an algorithm for pothole detection using stereo vision. The paper proposes a new hi-tech UGV called BIZON as an autonomous measuring platform to determine the load bearing capacity of natural airport runway pavements and pavement layers from unbound mixtures. Figure 1 shows UGV BIZON views. The platform is the size of a small city car and is dedicated to pavement measurement of natural airport surfaces using a three-wheeled mechanical system.