There is a large need to monitor and characterize the overall quality of roads in order to prioritize maintenance of infrastructure. The existing solution often used are class 1 profilometers, which are expensive systems that must be mounted to the vehicle. This prohibits small organizations from obtaining and is costly for very large organizations to maintain a fleet of such devices. Resultantly, there is a need for a cheaper solution for determining the roughness of pavement.

Our solution to this problem is a smartphone application that can calculate the International Roughness Index (IRI) of a given surface. The phone, mounted to the car, will collect the accelerometer data which will be used to calculate the IRI. Once the calculation is completed, the application will then store the determined IRI associated with the road in question, determined by the GPS of the device. As smartphones are ubiquitous, this will drastically decrease the cost of pavement monitoring.

The optimal deliverable we hope to have by the end of this project is a cohesive platform that can be used to measure and store pavement roughness data. Potential users of our project should be able to setup a multitude of client devices to measure road data, which would be able to be processed and stored in real-time. The outputs of project should be robust frontend and backend systems that allow for easy, intuitive, and useful data metrics on pavement roughness. All of this done using a low setup and operating budget from the client.

Project Overview Diagram