Establishing Reality-Virtuality Interconnections in Urban Digital Twins for Superior Intelligent Road Inspection and Simulation

Road inspection is crucial for maintaining road serviceability and ensuring traffic safety, as road defects gradually develop and compromise functionality. Traditional inspection methods, which rely on manual evaluations, are labor-intensive, costly, and time-consuming. While data-driven approaches are gaining traction, the scarcity and spatial sparsity of real-world road defects present significant challenges in acquiring high-quality datasets. Existing simulators designed to generate detailed synthetic driving scenes, however, lack models for road defects. Moreover, advanced driving tasks that involve interactions with road surfaces, such as planning and control in defective areas, remain underexplored. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-modal sensor platform integrated with an urban digital twin (UDT) system for intelligent road inspection. First, hierarchical road models are constructed from real-world driving data collected using vehicle-mounted sensors, resulting in highly detailed representations of road defect structures and surface elevations. Next, digital road twins are generated to create simulation environments for comprehensive analysis and evaluation of algorithm performance. These scenarios are then imported into a simulator to facilitate both data acquisition and physical simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that driving tasks, including perception and decision-making, benefit significantly from the high-fidelity road defect scenes generated by our system.