A Mobile and Modular Low-Cost Sensor System for Road Surface Recognition Using a Bicycle

The quality of pavements is significant to comfort and safety when riding a bicycle on roads and cycleways. As pavements are affected by ageing due to environmental impacts, periodic inspection is required for maintenance planning. Since this involves considerable efforts and costs, there is a need to monitor roads using affordable sensors. This paper presents a modular and low-cost measurement system for road surface recognition. It consists of several sensors that are attached to a bicycle to record e.g. forces or the suspension travel while driving. To ensure high sample rates in data acquisition, the data capturing and storage tasks are distributed to several microcontrollers and the monitoring and control is performed by a single board computer. In addition, the measuring system is intended to simplify the tedious documentation of ground truth. We present the results obtained by using time series analysis to identify different types of obstacles based on raw sensor signals.