California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This final report describes the development and the initial field test of an automated snowblower, focusing on one of the more difficult snow removal operations: blowing snow off the freeway along side a guardrail without touching the guardrail. The objective is to minimize damage to the snowblower, guardrail, and other elements of the infrastructure by deploying highly accurate and robust automated steering. The automatic steering is accomplished by following magnets embedded under the roadway. The development process includes transforming this real-world automated highway winter maintenance operation into a control problem, modeling snowblower, designing control algorithms, devising human machine interface, instrumenting a 20-ton snowblower, and conducting demonstration and field tests. The modified snowblower was equipped with add-on sensors, actuator, computer and driver interfaces; the test site includes eightguardrail sections between Kingvale and Soda Springs on the shoulders of Interstate-80 in the Sierra Mountain region near Donner Summit in California, USA. The ride-alongand test data demonstrated that the prototype system achieved all initial performance goals, and very positive feedback was received from various stakeholders as well as the operators who tried it.