An Android Sensors-Based Portable Road Health Monitoring System Utilizing Measurement Uncertainty Analysis

Abstract

Road health monitoring systems aim to obtain the technical indexes of roads and then analyze the usage and the degree of damage of the roads, which can provide an important basis for road construction, maintenance, and management. Road roughness is one of the main technical indexes for road quality evaluation and road health monitoring. A system that contains data obtaining, processing, and result evaluation is developed, and it is implemented as an application to measure and analyze longitudinal road profiles simply and conveniently using the sensors in a mobile phone. The application uses the accelerometer sensor and the gravity sensor to obtain vertical acceleration by a projection method, then denoises through empirical mode decompositions and a Butterworth filter, which has a repeated measurement error of 11%. Different filters were compared and the repeatability, accuracy, robustness, and effectiveness of the system were analyzed. An index is used to evaluated longitudinal road profiles so that the results can be analyzed and viewed interactively in the application and a series of cases are given in this paper.