A Low Cost Solution to Assess Road's Roughness Surface Condition for Pavement Management

This paper proposes the use of tablet's built-in accelerometers to estimate a roughness index able to capture pavement roughness condition. Several experiments were conducted in mud, gravel, chip-sealed and paved roads at different speeds and with different vehicles. Approximately 300km of roads in the province El Oro (Ecuador) were visited as part of the testing. It was confirmed that standard deviation of vertical accelerations normalized by speed -in meters per second- was able to produce a roughness indicator useful to assess surface condition. A comparison between two common tablet platforms found differences that could be explained by frequency of data collection, travelled path and influence of x,y accelerations in z-accelerations. Speed-normalized standard deviations of vertical accelerations were found to respond largely to the number of observations collected per second. An experiment with different vehicle sizes showed the impact of the suspension system. A protocol for data collection is given. It is expected that governments unable to purchase laser profilometers can make use of this approach to obtain a proxy for the International Roughness Index and therefore be in capacity to develop performance models and implement a pavement management system.

• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFD20 Pavement Monitoring and Evaluation. Alternate title: Low-Cost Solution to Assess Road's Roughness Surface Condition for Pavement Management
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Amador-Jimenez, Luis
  • Matout, Nagham
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Acceleration (Mechanics); Cost effectiveness; Evaluation and assessment; Field tests; Laptop computers; Pavement management systems; Profilometers; Roughness; Speed; Vehicle size
• Uncontrolled Terms: Tablet computers
• Geographic Terms: El Oro (Ecuador)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Pavements; I61: Equipment and Maintenance Methods;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515659
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-3086
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 24 2014 5:00PM