NEHRU INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

Thirumalayampalayam, Coimbatore - 641 105

(Approved by AICTE, New Delhi and Affiliated to Anna University, Chennai)
Accredited by NAAC with A+, Recognized by UGC with Section 2(f) and 12(B)
NBA Accredited Programmes : AERO, CSE
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Automatic Road Quality Detector

Batch Number : 19 Internal Guide : Mrs.S Priya

Batch Member & Reg. No : Nagarajan S - 721419104028

Sanoj V - 721419104042

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Abstract
Driving on smooth roads is something everyone enjoys and certainly provides for a
much safer environment. Rough and jagged roads can be hazardous to those who
drive on them, leading to the possibility of more accidents, and most significantly,
more deaths. The condition of roadways can vary greatly within both urban and
rural areas, and therefore, devices that can aid in quickly identifying hazardous
roadways can be extremely valuable to engineers and government striving to
increase the safety and quality of their metropolitan area. In this project, we
propose an automatic road quality detector for road quality monitoring and
logging. One advantage of this system is that it is designed for any type of vehicle,
so it can be embedded with any vehicle on road. All the vehicles will be connected
to a common cloud platform for uploading all the road information with the
corresponding locations.

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Introduction
This IoT device consists of a NODE MCU, Inertial Measurement Unit , a GPS module, and an
Sensor modules. When mounted to the user's car or truck, the device can detect spikes in
the acceleration of the vehicle. While sensing, the device will store the locations of
hazardous road conditions in its EEPROM memory, which it can later read from and upload
to a database. It will attempt to connect to its Wi-Fi network where a computer will be
running a Python script that accepts binary data from the module. The binary data consists
of the device's identifier and all of the sensor readings the device has measured in the past
trips that have not been uploaded yet. The running of the Python script removes the
operational overhead from the module, allowing for the fastest possible relaying of data to
the database. While this prototype IoT device is simple, its capability to successfully and
automatically identify hazardous road conditions could enable it to reduce the number of
road-related crashes and deaths. Giving city maintenance engineers, and construction
companies access to the locations of hazardous roads has the capacity to save thousands of
lives all around the world
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Objective(s)

 The goal of this project is to develop a prototype capable of aiding

in the solving of one of the major problems in urban, suburban,
and rural areas.

 To design and implement a system to monitor road quality using

data from all vehicles.

 To obtain improved and uniform standard of road construction.

 To minimizing the cost of quality control.

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Existing System and Limitations

Existing System

Direct observation method it means the staff directly relies on their

own quality control experience to detect the actual construction
quality of roads.

Recognizing the road quality using high resolution satellite imagery.

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Existing System and Limitations

Limitations

 In road quality detection using satellite image was not efficient and
accurate and also it depends on the climate, quality and quantity of
data available .
 Direct observation method is not cost efficient. It cost 2 to 5 percent
of total construction cost every year.
 In the existing system the accuracy is less and these solutions come
with a high cost, closed source code, excessive human analyst.

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Proposed System and Advantages
Proposed System
 This system is designed for automatic road quality monitoring and logging. This
system can be embedded in any vehicle on road.
 we use different kinds of smart sensors for detecting anomalies on the road, such
as an accelerometer sensor for detecting bumps and gutters on the roads by
calculating the linear acceleration of the vehicle, if any anomaly is detected then
the location of the vehicle is noted using GPS module embedded with the
system. This data is uploaded to a cloud for creating a map based on which
maintenance can be done.
Advantages
 In proposed system accuracy and efficiency is high and also comes with low cost.
 Time and Cost Management.
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System Architecture

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Block Diagram

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 Data Flow Diagram

IoT Device Flowchart

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 Data Flow Diagram

Python Server Flowchart

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 System Requirements
Hardware Requirements:
Processor : Intel i3 or More
Ram : 4GB or More
Hard Disk : 128GB or More
Network : Wireless Network

Hardware Components:
NodeMCU : ESP8266MOD
Sensor Modules : IMU, GPS, IR and Ultrasonic
Power Supply : 9v Battery or 3.7v LiPo Battery
Connection : Connecting Jumper Wires and JST Wire

Software Requirements:
Operating System : Windows 7/8/9/10/11
SDK : Python 3.9.5
IDE : Arduino 2.1 and Firebase
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List of Modules

Assembly

Programming

Cloud Database

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Module Description
Assembly
The physical components that a system requires to function. It encompasses
everything with a circuit board that operates within a system. It including the
motherboard, sensor modules, power supply, and so on.

Programming
The Arduino programming language has compiled on the Arduino IDE. It can be
downloaded from https://www.arduino.cc/. This programming language is based on
a simple hardware programming language called Processing, which is very similar to
C language

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Module Description
Cloud Database
After all devices are connected, we can move to compile code for ESP8266 to
connect it to the Internet. When it is connected successfully, ESP8266 acts as a client
and starts communicating with server. It needs to go through some steps before the
server stores data. First, the data must be available. It means that the sensor should
be able to transfer info from real world into data. We are using firebase is a set of
backend cloud computing services and application to store and retrieve data.

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Module Implementation

Once powered on, the device will detect high amplitude vibrations in
whatever surface it is attached to and save them to its EEPROM chip. The
device reads the Z axis acceleration value which aligns with an up/down vector.
As the device operates, it keeps track of a rolling mean of the previous 1s of
data and can compare its current Z-axis acceleration value with that moving
average. When the amplitude of the difference between the current value and
the current moving average is beyond a certain threshold, the detection code
is triggered. Based on the following graph, the rolling mean of acceleration
data allows the device to smooth out the noisy accelerometer data.

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Module Implementation

Acceleration Data Readings

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Module Implementation
The following graph shows the absolute value of the difference between the measured
accelerometer value and the current value of the rolling mean. Whenever a sample
rises above the threshold line of 0.17G's, the detector has detected a bump in the road.

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Module Implementation
While this threshold of 0.17G's may seem arbitrary, it is, in fact, not. In my initial test runs
of this device, I had the device directly connected to a laptop which was saving the raw data
the device measured. While driving, I mounted a button on the device that would mark what
I believed to be a significant bump in the road. After a test drive of collecting data, I could
later review the data and graph it based on Latitude and Longitude, drawing markers at
where it detected bumps in the road. I could then modify the threshold to produce the
fewest false-positives and the most true-positives. Below figure shows like quite a few
possibly hazardous locations, and that would be exactly correct. Based on these results, this
device can successfully identify the locations of hazardous, uneven, and significantly rough
roads, increasing public awareness of road conditions and enabling the faster repair of these
dangerous roads. After being powered on again, the device will attempt to communicate
over Wi-Fi with the Python script to upload its readings to the Firestore Database. The ease
of access the Firestore database provides would enable a massive fleet of these devices to
report the locations of hazardous roads all around the world automatically.
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Sample Output

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Conclusion
This paper investigates on the feasibility of an road surface quality control in terms of
surface anomalies detection by means of sensor devices. The algorithm developed to
detect road bumps and potholes was based on the analysis of the vertical acceleration
impulse. The temporal derivative of the acceleration absolute amplitude in one second
that was calculated as the difference between the maximum and the minimum value in
the defined unit of time. The vertical acceleration impulse corresponds to a high-
energy event, that is labelled as an “Hazardous Location” on the road surface. In order
to better understand how the acceleration signal monitored by means of the device
located inside the vehicle can be used to classify the road damage severity. Results
showed that there was a linear relationship between the acceleration impulse and the
potholes.
Future work will also address to the possibility of giving an useful tools to road
maintenance operators for the monitoring of road quality and for a more adequate
allocation of resources.
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References

1. Astarita, V., Caruso, M.V., Danieli, G., Festa, D.C., Giofrè, V.P., Iuele, T., & Vaiana, R.
(2012). A mobile application for road surface quality control: UNIquALroad. Procedia -
Social and Behavioral Science ,54, 1135-1144, DOI: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.09.828.
2. Bhoraskar, R., Vankadhara, N., Raman, B., & Kulkarni, P. (2012). Wolverine: Traffic and
road condition estimation using smartphone sensors.
3. PRISM: Platform for Remote Sensing using Smartphones. MobiSys’10, June 15–18, San
Francisco, California, USA.
4. Environmental Impacts and Fuel Efficiency of Road Pavements, Industry ReportMarch
2004.
5. Mohan, P., Padmanabhan, V. N., & Ramjee, R. (2008). Nericell: Rich monitoring of road
and traffic conditions using mobile smartphone. ACM SenSys 2008, Raleigh, North
Carolina, USA.

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