Validation of smartphone based pavement roughness measures
This work addresses the need for cost-effective pavement assessment methods for transportation agencies and engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing smartphone-based research by adding validation steps.
The study tackled the problem of validating smartphone-based pavement roughness measurements by correlating them with user opinions on ride quality and objective data from a Road Surface Profiler, resulting in a model that showed acceptable correlation between smartphone measurements and user ratings.
Smartphones are equipped with sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscope, and GPS in one cost-effective device with an acceptable level of accuracy. There have been some research studies carried out in terms of using smartphones to measure the pavement roughness. However, a little attention has been paid to investigate the validity of the measured pavement roughness by smartphones via other subjective methods such as the user opinion. This paper aims at calculating the pavement roughness data with a smartphone using its embedded sensors and investigating its correlation with a user opinion about the ride quality. In addition, the applicability of using smartphones to assess the pavement surface distresses is examined. Furthermore, to validate the smartphone sensor outputs objectively, the Road Surface Profiler is applied. Finally, a good roughness model is developed which demonstrates an acceptable level of correlation between the pavement roughness measured by smartphones and the ride quality rated by users.