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Development of a Road Surface Condition Monitoring and Database System

Conference Paper · September 2018

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 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Its Applications
(ICTA 2018)
Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria
September 5 – 6, 2018

Development of a Road Surface Condition Monitoring and Database System

H. Bello-Salau1, A. M. Aibinu2, A. J. Onumanyi1, S. Ahunsi1, E. N. Onwuka1, and J. J. Dukiya3

1
Department of Telecommunication Engineering, Federal University of Technology, P.M.B. 65, Minna, Niger State
2
Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Federal University of Technology, P.M.B. 65, Minna, Niger State
3
Department of Transport Management, Federal University of Technology, P.M.B. 65, Minna, Niger State

Abstract—This paper proposes a road surface condition accelerometers, some of which may be poorly developed
monitoring device. The design features the use of a leading to inaccurate measurements. In the absence of
programmed accelerometer sensor deployed to respond to existing standards, it becomes difficult to generalize on the
vehicular vibrations as a function of the vehicle's acceleration use of SBAs. In addition, the lack of standard databases for
due to gravity (g-force). Furthermore, a database was created storing sensed traces fetters the standardization/research
and hosted online to store the traces acquired over the process while poorly aiding road maintenance exercises.
different test surfaces. The test results show that the proposed Thus, in this paper, a dedicated road surface condition
system successfully sensed the utilized road surfaces, and
monitoring device is proposed based on the use of an
effectively logged the acquired traces into the created database.
accelerometer device embedded in a National Instrument
This device will be beneficial to road maintenance agencies for
road surface monitoring, and it can be installed in both
(NI) MyRio board. Furthermore, report on the creation of an
manned and unmanned vehicles to enhance road navigation. In online database for hosting the acquired road surface
addition, the stored traces can be freely accessed and used by condition traces is presented. The results obtained are
researchers working in related areas. promising and suggest the possibility for having standardized
road surface condition traces across different countries all
Keywords-accelerometer; database; potholes; road bumps; sensed under the same device condition. The database can be
smartphone accessed by expert users or researchers working on related
problems. Consequently, this paper is noted to have made the
I. INTRODUCTION following contributions, namely:
 The development of a dedicated road surface
Most poorly constructed and maintained roads are largely condition monitoring device based on an
characterized by anomalies such as potholes, rutting, speed- accelerometer NI MyRio board.
bumps and pavement cracks. These anomalies are causatives  The design and development of an online database
to a number of road traffic accidents leading to the loss of for storing accelerometer-based road surface
lives and properties [1, 2]. Often, these anomalies are condition traces. These contributions can serve as a
induced owing to the use of poor quality road construction platform for researchers who intend to study,
materials, inadequate drainage systems, and poor road evaluate and compare related algorithms.
maintenance culture [3]. They cause accidents, and The rest of the paper is structured as follows: a brief
negatively impact the economic development of the affected literature review is presented in Section 2. The proposed
areas. dedicated road surface condition monitoring approach as
In conditions where anomalies persist, a new paradigm well as the online database creation is presented in section 3.
may be required to curb the rate of induced accidents. One Experimental results and discussions are provided in Section
approach from the vehicular point of view is to facilitate 4. While, conclusion and future work is presented in section
vehicles with the capability to sense, characterize and profile 5.
road anomalies [4, 5]. This will provide early information to
drivers warning them about impending anomalies to aid their
navigation. In this regard, Smartphone Based
Accelerometers (SBAs) have been widely used in the
literature [6-8]. Their use can be attributed to their quick
operational response time, low maintenance cost as well as
the ease of processing the measured traces. Essentially,
SBAs have been used to detect road anomalies.
Nevertheless, a major drawback with deploying SBAs lies in
the variance in sensitivity levels associated with different Figure 1. Proposed System Design and Implementation
types of SBAs. Different smartphones incorporate different

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 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Its Applications (ICTA 2018)

remains essential to develop road surface condition

monitoring devices that are void of SBAs. In addition,
designing and developing open databases for free and easy
access for research and maintenance purposes is worthwhile.
These served as the motivation for the study presented in
this paper.
III. METHODOLOGY
The proposed system was developed in three stages as
presented in Figure 1. These stages are the design of the
dedicated road surface condition monitoring device, the
experimental setup for data acquisition, and the database
development stage. Details of each stage are presented in the
following subsections.
A. Design of the Proposed Dedicated Road Surface
Condition Monitoring Device
An accelerometer-embedded device (National Instrument
(NI) MyRio board to be specific) was programmed using
LABVIEW software. This was done to measure the vehicle's
vibration relative to its acceleration due to gravity (g-force).
The three-dimensional spatial axis of the device was
considered for measurement. Each axis monitors specific
responses of the vehicle. For example, the turning (left and
right) motion of the vehicle, the slope of the road and the
Figure 2. Design of the Proposed Dedicated Road Surface Monitoring
Device
upward and downward movement of the vehicle correspond
to the traces displayed on the x, y and z-axis of the
accelerometer, respectively. Each axis, been channels on the
II. BRIEF LITERATURE REVIEW myRio board were opened and configured based on a preset
This section presents an overview of some specific sampling rate using the LABVIEW software. The value of
achievements in the literature that motivated this study. the preset sampling rate fs used for measurement at every
Basically, it is noted that most methods for road surface T second was computed using equation (1). The sampled
monitoring are limited by (1) The dependency of the traces along each dimension (x, y and z-axis) were then
system's performance on the SBA's sensitivity level, and (2) passed through two Lowpass inverse Chebyshev filters of
The lack of standard open databases for storing measured order 3 with a cutoff frequency of 100Hz. The filter's transfer
traces for free easy access. Such open databases possess the
function H I ,n used to predict the device's output response is
potential to contribute towards enhancing research purposes
in this regard. For example, the approaches adopted in [6-9], expressed in equation (2) [21]. These filters were cascaded in
resulted in traces that were stored in respective databases. series such that the output of the first filter served as the
However, these databases were unopened for public access, input to the second filter. The choice of this filter was based
thus stifling free access to these traces even for research on its ability to produce flat magnitude pass band responses
purposes. In addition, the effectiveness of the SBA approach and steep attenuation rates, which were desired. The
used in [7, 9-11] was a function of the quality of the phone preprocessing stage was carried out in order to filter out
make. noisy components from the vehicle acceleration trace
A similar approach for road surface condition monitoring acquired via each accelerometer channel. The filtered traces
based on SBA was proposed in [12]. Their approach from each channel were then merged together in the
involved profiling as well as GPS coordinate mapping during LABVIEW environment to display the tri-axial traces as a
their drive test exercise. Similar approaches were proposed single waveform. The sample index as well as the
in [13-17]. Essentially, the performance of these approaches corresponding measured traces were exported as Microsoft
depended on the quality of the SBA used as a function of the Excel worksheets and later analyzed. The analogue input pin
phone make. Furthermore, the experimental traces acquired of the NI Myrio device was used to connect a Global
in these works were not made available for free public use. Positioning System (GPS) to the device via the Arduino
Some other methods were noted in [5, 6, 10, 18]. Despite Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This was done
their complexities, they were noted for their success in to log the corresponding coordinates associated with each
accurate trace measurements. Similar approaches were data point in the channel (that is, the x, y and z axis). A
proposed in [4, 15, 19, 20]. The results from these works flowchart of the design process as carried out using the
indicated successful trace measurements at the expense of LABVIEW software is presented in Figure 2. The entire
closed access to the measured stored traces. Summarily, it block diagram of the system is shown in Figure 3. The

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 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Its Applications (ICTA 2018)

process flow of the GPS system is presented in Figure 4. The used to match the measured traces to their physical location.
GPS was first initialized to log and record the corresponding This ensured that the physical locations where the road
longitude and latitude coordinates of each sensed data point. surface traces were acquired could be easily tracked.
Then these coordinates were saved on a memory card and

Figure 3. LABVIEW Block Diagram VI of the Designed System

1
fs  (1)
T
B. Experimental Setup for Road Surface Conditions Data
i2 .C n2 (wo w ) Acquisition
H I ,n  j w / wo   (2) The sampling rate of the developed dedicated
 
1  i2 .C n2 wo / w  accelerometer embedded device was set to 20Hz based on
where, w is the normalized passband edge frequency, the value computed using equation (1). This was done in
LABVIEW via the front panel with a screenshot provided in
wo is the passband edge frequency, n is the order of Figure 5. The flexibility of allowing users to set the required
approximation function for the filter and C n w  is the sampling rate was introduced for ease of data processing,
analysis and localization of road anomalies. Once developed,
Chebyshev polynomial of first kind of degree n , astop is the the device was placed on the dashboard of a car and
stop of the passband. The inverse passband gain adjustment connected to a Laptop during the data acquisition phase (see
Figure 6). The choice of the device's placement in the car
factor i is expressed in (3). This enables the system to was considered optimal following the report in [6, 11, 20].
produce a more stable output. Two test roads were considered during the drive test namely,
1 (1) A road with potholes termed Test Road One (TR1) and
i  (3) (2) A road with bumps termed Test Road Two (TR2). The
0.1.astop
10 1 traces acquired during the drive test were saved in Microsoft
Excel format and subsequently uploaded to the database.

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 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Its Applications (ICTA 2018)

Figure 7: Screenshot of the Accelerometer Readings Locations Database

Figure 4. Developed GPS Coordinate Acquisition System Fields Structure

Figure 8: Road Anomalies Data Saved in the Created Database

Figure 5. Screenshot of LABVIEW Front Panel Vi during Data
Acquisition

Figure 6. Vehicle used, and Experimental Setup Figure 9: Content of a Sample File saved on the Database

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 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technology and Its Applications (ICTA 2018)

updated to the web server. This will enable free access to the
data by researchers working on related problems.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The output of the developed dedicated road surface
condition monitoring system logged on excel sheet are stored
on the created database which is hosted online as described
in section III. Screen shots of each of the excel files
containing the acquired acceleration data during drive tests
on the two test areas saved on the created database is shown
in Figure 8. Any of these files can be access by activating it,
and the content will be displayed as shown in the screenshot
of Figure 9. Observe that, the six database fields created
namely the Serial Number (S/No), X, Y and Z-axis of the
measured acceleration data as well as the corresponding
longitude and latitude of each data points logged by the
Figure 10: Downloaded Sample CSV Excel File from the Database developed road surface monitoring system are displayed in
Figure 9. However, in order to download this saved data in
C. The Database Development for Storing Acquired Data excel CSV format for processing and analysis, the tab
labeled download spreadsheet at the top left hand corner of
In this section, the design process for the database the online database can be activated. A sample CSV excel
creation, online hosting and the data storage is presented file downloaded online from the database is shown in Figure
1) Creating the database using MySQL 10. It was noted that the developed device gave similar
An open source cross platform, web server solution stack results in terms of the measured accelerations data along the
package called XAMPP control panel was used for the x, y and z-axis to that reported in [8, 9, 22] despite using
creation exercise. MySQL and Apache were executed from different approaches. Though, the approaches reported in [8,
the control panel of the XAMPP software. A browser 9, 22] are based on the use of SBAs, which limit their
(Mozilla Firefox to be specific) was used to launch the reliability based on the phone make. Furthermore, the
domain “localhost/phpmyadmin/” via the browser's address proposed system unlike other approaches reported in [10,
bar. The database was created and named "Accelerometer 15, 16] made the measured traces open access available via
Readings Locations". The created database was displayed on http://data.gloveth.com.
the phpmyadmin interface indicating that the database was
successfully created. V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
2) Creating table (fields) for the accelerometer readings This paper has presented both the design and
locations database development of a road surface condition monitoring system
The created database "Accelerometer Readings and an online database for data storage. The database has
Locations" was launched from the phpmyadmin interface. been hosted online for public access. The sensitivity of the
The name "Gidan-Kwano" was assigned and the required proposed system is predictable unlike the SBAs whose
table columns (fields) of six (6) was created. Each field was sensitivities are phone specific. In ascertaining the
named as follows: (1) Serial number (S/N) (2) X-Axis (3) Y- effectiveness of the developed database, different browsers
Axis (4) Z-Axis (5) Longitude and (6) Latitude. The column and smart devices were used to remotely access it. This was
data type for each field was assigned. The integer data done to demonstrate the feasibility of free access to users and
format type was assigned for S/No and floating for all other interested researchers alike. Future research works will
fields. A screen shot of the structure of the created consider developing an approach for post processing the
“Accelerometer Readings Locations” database fields is stored traces and communicating them among vehicles as in
shown in Figure 7. a VANET system. In addition, measures to validate the
3) Importing the saved sensed road anomalies data in reliability of the saved data will be explore, as well as
excel to the developed database mechanism for ensuring the security of the database.
The data structure in CSV format contained the same
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