Road surface condition monitoring via multiple sensor-equipped vehicles

Although governments have spent a great deal of effort to provide safer road networks, surface defects such as potholes, suck-in manholes, and defective street cuts are still commonly found on roads. The current methods of road surface monitoring depend on reports from drivers. However, these methods usually incur a long delay and thus it is difficult to obtain up-to-data information on road conditions. To overcome the drawbacks of the current methods, we propose an innovative and automated method that uses a mobile data collection kit mounted on vehicles. The kit includes an accelerometer, global positioning system (GPS) sensor and microcomputer. A local algorithm is embedded to increase the efficiency of data logging. Recorded data from multiple vehicles are transmitted to a back-end server, where a street defect detection algorithm is performed based on the large amount of collected data. We have tested our system in real road conditions. The identified road conditions are visualized on online maps.