Road Roughness Estimation Using Acceleration Data from Smartphones

Abstract

The International Roughness Index (IRI) is a serviceability measure index for highway maintenance performance evaluation. At the Thailand Department of Highways (DOH), IRI is generally measured by Laser Profilers and Walking Profilers, which require experts to operate and process data. For the day-to-day road maintenance, real-time approximated IRI values are helpful to locate the damage area where roadwork is urgently needed. This study presents a simple method to estimate IRI from acceleration data collected from smartphones equipped with accelerometers. Acceleration data are segmented into 100-m sections and processed with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). For each 100-m road section, an average IRI is collected by using an accuracy Laser Profiler and compared with the processed acceleration data. The primary result shows that IRI has a linear relation with the sum of Magnitude of the FFT of the vertical acceleration obtained from the smartphones with the R-squared of 0.8745. In future, the DOH plans to extend this research findings and develop a smartphone application to collect real-time IRI for road maintenance management.