Demo: Mobile Crowdsensing of Road Surface Roughness

The roughness of the road surface affects driving safety and comfort. Having complete and up to date information on the state of the road network is essential for maintenance planning, but it entails time consuming and costly monitoring activities. As a matter of fact, maintenance interventions are mainly based on the results of case by case inspections prompted by drivers’ reports. Moreover, qualitative observations are seldom supported by objective measures, making it difficult for administrators to collect data providing a clear perception of the actual priorities. Recent studies have shown that it is possible to exploit the triaxial accelerometers with which smartphones are equipped to obtain a sound indicator of road surface roughness [1, 2]. A crowdsensing system, called SmartRoadSense [3], has been developed to allow any driver to contribute with his/her smartphone in monitoring the status of the roads he/she travels by car. As shown in Fig. 1, Smartroadsense is composed of: a mobile application, a cloud-based backend, and a web portal. The application runs in background on any car-mounted Android smartphone, reads the accelerometer data at a fre-