Using smartphones as a very low-cost tool for road inventories

Road inventories are a key component in the planning of road networks as they allow for efficient management and a better return on the investment. Current techniques for carrying out road inventories are expensive and entail long planning processes and data postprocessing. Furthermore, these inventories are only useful to those parties interested in designing and building road networks. This study presents a new method for create road inventories based on the use of the latest generation cellular phones, also called smartphones. This paper describes the use of several mobile apps developed for this project that were implemented during the different stages of road inventory process. The results indicate that the data processing speed, its low cost, and the ease of implementation from any type of vehicle validate the proposed procedure as an invaluable tool (1) to do inventories of all types of road networks that are not accessible to cars; (2) to manage the routine maintenance of small road networks; and (3) as a basis for future research projects on road design and outline.

[1]  Brian Caulfield,et al.  Does green make a difference: The potential role of smartphone technology in transport behaviour , 2013 .

[2]  Ahmed Youssef,et al.  RockSee: Video image measurements of physical features to aid in highway rock cut characterization , 2007, Comput. Geosci..

[3]  Francisco Javier Saura López,et al.  Sistema Avanzado para la Revisión e Inspección de la Seguridad de infraestructuras viarias , 2010 .

[4]  Vassilis Gikas,et al.  A Novel Geodetic Engineering Method for Accurate and Automated Road/Railway Centerline Geometry Extraction Based on the Bearing Diagram and Fractal Behavior , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[5]  Hassan A. Karimi,et al.  A pedestrian network construction algorithm based on multiple GPS traces , 2013 .

[6]  S. Cafiso A. Di Graziano,et al.  Automated in-vehicle data collection and treatment for existing roadway alignment , 2008 .

[7]  Felipe Jiménez,et al.  Improvements in road geometry measurement using inertial measurement systems in datalog vehicles , 2011 .

[8]  Xiaohua Tong,et al.  Estimating Geometric Parameters of Highways and Railways Using Least-Squares Adjustment , 2010 .

[9]  Claudio E. Palazzi,et al.  Road crossing recognition through smartphone's accelerometer , 2011, 2011 IFIP Wireless Days (WD).

[10]  Michael Nowak,et al.  Comparing the GPS capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S, Motorola Droid X, and the Apple iPhone for vehicle tracking using FreeSim_Mobile , 2011, 2011 14th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC).

[11]  Lydia Mazzi Kayondo-Ndandiko,et al.  Low Cost Methodology for Preliminary Road Maintenance Decision Support , 2011 .

[12]  Joseph E. Hummer,et al.  Comparison of mobile and manual data collection for roadway components , 2011 .

[13]  Alexandre M. Bayen,et al.  Evaluation of traffic data obtained via GPS-enabled mobile phones: The Mobile Century field experiment , 2009 .

[14]  Maria Castro,et al.  Geometric modelling of highways using global positioning system (GPS) data and spline approximation , 2006 .

[15]  Joseph E. Hummer,et al.  Collecting Horizontal Curve Data: Mobile Asset Vehicles and Other Techniques , 2013 .

[16]  Claudio E. Palazzi,et al.  Movement pattern recognition through smartphone's accelerometer , 2012, 2012 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC).

[17]  H. Christopher Frey,et al.  Road Grade Measurement Using In-Vehicle, Stand-Alone GPS with Barometric Altimeter , 2013 .

[18]  Jesús García,et al.  Context-Aided Sensor Fusion for Enhanced Urban Navigation , 2012, Sensors.

[19]  Ryan Newton,et al.  The pothole patrol: using a mobile sensor network for road surface monitoring , 2008, MobiSys '08.

[20]  Girts Strazdins,et al.  Real time pothole detection using Android smartphones with accelerometers , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems and Workshops (DCOSS).