Mapping City Potholes

The goal of this capstone design project was to design a fully automated data collection system that could be installed in any automotive vehicle to monitor road or highway pavement conditions. The system is based on recording and analyzing the output from an accelerometer mounted near a front wheel shock absorber. The data from the accelerometer is time and position tagged with GPS data from a GPS unit and stored to a DOS compatible file on a Compact Flash card. Once data is collected, Geographical Information System (GIS) software is used to remap the GPS surface roughness data to a physical location on a user viewable city map. This system can aid cities in the efficient release of road repair crew and lower the costs to the city due to civilian automobile damages