A Mobile Data Collection System Using Accelerometers for Pavement Maintenance and Rehabilitation

Nowadays many local governments require a proper method for monitoring the roughness of their pavements. To predict roughness conditions reliably, an objective and repeatable surface profile data collection system must be used. However, most local governments are frequently monitoring and determining pavement conditions through visual inspections. This study introduces a new mobile profiling system for more effective data collection and real-time monitoring of pavement roughness. The new system uses two accelerometers mounted on any passenger or commercial vehicle to measure surface profile based on the mechanical reproduction of a quarter-car model. According to the validation experiment, profiles measured by the new system closely agree with the measurements of manual surveys using the rod-and-level and a low-speed profiler. A power spectral analysis also verifies the accuracy of the system in terms of the spatial characteristic of the profile amplitude. Unlike conventional response-type profiling systems, the new system can directly compute the roughness scale called International Roughness Index (IRI) based on the measured profile. The computed IRI values for an interval of 200-m of the new system are accurate to within 10 percent as compared with that of the manual survey. For more advanced pavement monitoring approaches, the new system is adequate to provide information of localized roughness based on continuous IRI reports on arbitrary base lengths. Against the traditional pavement monitoring approaches based either on visual inspections or on laser profilers, the new system contributes to valid, quantitative, and economical profiling activities of road roughness.