Pavement roughness monitoring using android-based smartphone application in low-speed roads

Abstract

Pavement roughness is the imperfections in a pavement surface that affect the ride quality, safety, and some other factors in a vehicle. The International Roughness Index (IRI), a criterion to assess ride quality and pavement unevenness, can be used to express roughness. There are several ways to obtain data regarding the condition of the road surface, but almost all of them run at low speeds with significant reliance on human involvement or call for advanced measurement tools, which typically have high costs and demand expert operators. A major percentage of the road network is not covered by the annual collection of pavement condition data by several transportation organizations. The data collection was done in the Roadroid application by selecting video mode in Roadroid application. Finally, IRI values obtained by RDA were compared with IRI values generated by the Roadroid application. Based on the relationship between the RoadRoid and actual IRI values of Sri Lanka’s Road Development Authority (RDA), statistical analysis shows a linear regression model with R2 = 0.766. The experiment's results support the smartphone app as a practical substitute for evaluating pavement roughness on low-speed roads, offering efficient data delivery and technical benefits.