Low-cost infrared-based pavement roughness data acquisition for low volume roads

On-time maintenance of deteriorated pavement is a crucial step toward minimizing its life cycle costs. Maintenance and rehabilitation actions are planned based on pavement condition data including road roughness. The condition of low volume roads is not monitored frequently due to the high cost of data collection and their less priority. However, road users traverse them widely. The objective of this study is to develop an inexpensive data acquisition system based on the use of a Sharp IR-based sensor and an accelerometer to capture pavement profile and estimate its roughness index with adequate accuracy for low volume roads. Design of study, data management, data acquisition, and data analysis are the steps of this research. The results demonstrate that the developed system is able to measure pavement roughness of uneven roads with 87.4% accuracy at 30 km/h speed. Therefore, it can be a good alternative for expensive data collection vehicles.