Nailing A Landslide (Available only in the Geo/Environmental Special Issue)
When mud flows in California threatened to stop traffic on a freeway and erode a street from below, Caltrans worked around the clock to stabilize the slope using soil nailing and shotcrete....
Rocky Mountain HOV
In 1988, Colorado DOT and the firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall, Denver, the oversight consultant on the project, set out to bring the highway up-to-date and promote...
Down-to-Earth Terminal Design
From New England to the Pacific Northwest, airport terminals in the 1990s are being designed and built to meet foreseeable demand--with very little uncommitted space. The speculative nature...
Selecting Tower Cranes
Looming over the skyline like steel dinosaurs, tower cranes can look deceptively similar. But these beasts of burden are not a homogenous species, and selecting and positioning the right...
The Toll Road That Wouldn't Die
When government and business leaders scooped the first shovelfuls of earth from a field near Dulles International Airport on September 29, 1993, it marked the start of construction on...
Bart to the Future
Construction has reached the midway point on the $2.7 billion San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District Extensions Program. The first three extensions, due to open in 1995, will expand...
What Price Congestion Management?
Congestion pricing--the idea that, when more people want to use a road, they should pay (or pay more) for the privilege--was dismissed in the 1950s and rejected in the 1970s in the U.S....
Is Virtual Reality for Real?
Virtual reality, an advanced visualization technology, will change certain aspects of civil engineering. The method allows people to simulate conditions, render designs and test these...
Bridge Design: Reality Bites Back
Many bridge engineers tend to ignore the process nature of reality, the fact that everything in this universe changes from moment to moment. When they are given the responsibility for...
The Bell Tolls for Toll Booths
Many older toll facilities have reached their traffic-handling capacity, blocking the efficient movement of cars onto toll facilities. The article examines problems associated with reconfiguring...
Wider Ride to the Rainbow
Engineers on the project to widen the entrance to the Rainbow Bridge between New York and Ontario let the aesthetics of the Niagara Falls setting dictate their design decisions. The challenge...
Ready for Anything
The author describes the temporary bridge developed by Caltrans for use in emergency situations where stretches of highway bridge are damaged. The bridge is made of salvaged railroad flatcars...
Depressing Traffic Top-Down
Top down construction will permit the City and County of Denver to maintain traffic at two congested intersections while a tunnel is driven below them. The project, which will carry Speer...
The Role of Computer Graphics in Teleoperation
Computer graphics techniques developed by the Advanced Teleoperation (ATOP) Project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the control of remote manipulators, primarily for space applications,...
A Feature Based Path Planning System for Robotic Stenciling of Roadway Markings
Roadway sign stenciling is a hazardous operation exposing the roadway maintenance and construction crew to on going traffic. The current practice involves manual painting using a mechanical...
Autonomous Navigation for Structured Exterior Environments
The Telemanaged Mobile Security Station (TMSS) was developed at Sandia National Laboratories to investigate the role of mobile robotics in exterior perimeter security systems. A major...
Goals and Requirements for Scientific Lunar Rovers
The detailed science requirements for future lunar rovers should, of course, be based on achievable science goals and objectives. It is clear that lunar geoscience will benefit by robotic...
A Mobile Robot for Reconnaissance of HAZMAT Incident Sites
First entry into situations where hazardous materials have been accidentally spilled or released is extremely dangerous. Often the type of material, its exact location, and the extent...
An Overview of the Accident Response Mobile Manipulation System (ARMMS)
The development of a high mobility platform integrated with high strength manipulation is under development at Sandia National Laboratories. The mobility platform used is a High Mobility...
Robotic Workcell for Waste Handling
During the sorting and repackaging of recovered waste, robotic systems for grasping and manipulating odd-shaped objects of varying sizes will be needed. Also, during the removal of buried...
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