Automated Pothole Detection Using Wireless Sensor Motes

Poorly maintained roads are a fact of life in most developing countries; it is certainly the case in Sri Lanka. The lack of funding to maintain the road surfaces is a main reason for the dilapidated condition of roads in these countries, but it is not the only reason. The absence of an effective monitoring system is one reason for this problem. A monitoring system can help to take remedial actions and that can lower the cost of maintenance. However, the cost of an effective monitoring system itself can be quite costly and hardy affordable for a developing country. We are developing a road surface condition monitoring system that uses acceleration sensors mounted on public transport buses to monitor the road surface condition with only a few sensors. These bus mounted sensors gather vertical and horizontal acceleration data on its route together with the GPS coordinates of the data collection points. This road surface condition monitoring system is in fact piggy backed on an environmental pollution monitoring system called BusNet that uses the sensors mounted on the public transport buses to collect data on environmental pollution. In this paper we present a technique that we developed to identify ”potholes” on roads by analyzing the acceleration data.