THE USE OF SMART PHONES TO ESTIMATE ROAD ROUGHNESS: A CASE STUDY IN TURKEY

Metin Mutlu AYDIN¹ , MEHMET SINAN YILDIRIM² , LARS FORSLOF³

Previous studies have shown that road surface conditions are an important factor for road quality. To provide quality on road surface, it should be observed steadily and repaired as necessarily. There are many process to determine road surface condition. Using a smart phone to collect data is an alternative and simple application because of it’s low cost, wider population coverage property and easy utilization. This paper explores the utilization of Roadroid, a simple android application, as a low cost vehicle-based solution for road surface condition monitoring with using sensors from smartphones. In the scope of this study, site experiments have been conducted to collect data using acceleration and GPS properties of a smartphone in a specific (passenger car) vehicle type. This method was evaluated with 3259 km urban and rural road data collected from the site experiments in Turkey, and it was seen from the results that average 84.4% of Turkish roads have good, 7.9% have satisfactory, 3.8 have unsatisfactory and 3.8% have poor road roughness conditions. It shows that approximately 4% of Turkish roads need maintenance urgently. Also experimental study results confirm that Roadroid have a great potential to evaluate road surface roughness condition correctly, even under obstacle like, potholes, manholes and decelerating marks.

Keywords
Road Surface Condition, Road Roughness, Mobile Sensing, Mobile Sensing, Roadroid,