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Measurement of Street Pavement Roughness in Urban Areas Using Smartphone

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Abstract

Measuring pavement roughness is one of the most important activities needed in any Pavement Management System; moreover, pavement roughness plays an important role for determining riding comfort on the road network. Today’s smartphones have very small sensors with high ability to monitor movements and vibrations in all directions and collect thousands of data points in a short period. This increases the potential of using it as a tool for pavement condition estimation. This method will help to save a reasonable amount of money compared to high-cost roughness measurement devices. Also, due to the limited resources of transportation agencies in developing countries, this method could help to expand the pavement roughness collection survey. This study presents a cost-effective pavement roughness evaluation procedure in terms of the International Roughness Index (IRI) using the smartphone for street pavement in urban areas. Different signal processing techniques were used to filter the collected acceleration data, including Butterworth bandpass filter, moving average filter, and baseline correction filter. The effect of vehicle speed, smartphone mounting position, acceleration collection sampling rate, and integration method were studied to determine the best factors that could be used to estimate IRI accurately. It was found that the proposed method could estimate IRI with very good accuracy (r2 = 0.72) at a sampling rate of 200 samples/s and with vent mount type and using the double integration method. Also, the results proved that the increase of vehicle speed increased the root mean square and variance of vertical acceleration values and it could be minimized by applying the speed normalization technique.

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  1. Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan

    Yazan Ibrahim Alatoom & Turki I. Obaidat

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  1. Yazan Ibrahim Alatoom
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Correspondence to Yazan Ibrahim Alatoom.

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Alatoom, Y.I., Obaidat, T.I. Measurement of Street Pavement Roughness in Urban Areas Using Smartphone. Int. J. Pavement Res. Technol. 15, 1003–1020 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42947-021-00069-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42947-021-00069-3

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