A low cost solution to assess road's roughness surface condition

for Pavement Management

Authors: Luis Amador-Jimnez1, Nagham Matout2,

1
Assistant Professor - Concordia University, and
Researcher - Universidad Tcnica de Machala

Tel: 514 848-2424 (ext. 5783). Fax: 514 848-7965.

Email: amador@encs.concordia.ca
(Corresponding Author)

2
Research Assistant,
Dept. of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University
Montreal, QC, Canada
Tel: 514 848-2424 (ext. 5783). Fax: 514 848-7965.
Email: nmatout@gmail.com

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Abstract
This paper proposes the use of tablet's built-in accelerometers to estimate a roughness
index able to capture pavement roughness condition. Several experiments were
conducted in mud, gravel, chip-sealed and paved roads at different speeds and with
different vehicles. Approximately 300km of roads in the province El Oro (Ecuador) were
visited as part of the testing. It was confirmed that standard deviation of vertical
accelerations normalized by speed -in meters per second- was able to produce a
roughness indicator useful to assess surface condition. A comparison between two
common tablet platforms found differences that could be explained by frequency of data
collection, travelled path and influence of x,y accelerations in z-accelerations. Speed-
normalized standard deviations of vertical accelerations were found to respond largely to
the number of observations collected per second. An experiment with different vehicle
sizes showed the impact of the suspension system. A protocol for data collection is given.
It is expected that governments unable to purchase laser profilometers can make use of
this approach to obtain a proxy for the International Roughness Index and therefore be in
capacity to develop performance models and implement a pavement management system.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Introduction
Pavement management systems have been employed to optimize maintenance and
rehabilitation decisions in order to deliver good levels of service to road users while
managing limited resources [1]. A typical goal for pavement management is to preserve
roads surface condition good in order to reduce travel time, vehicle deterioration and gas
emissions [1,2]. Poor road's surface condition may even result in damages of agricultural
goods and discomfort for the driver [3]. To develop a pavement management system, one
requires the knowledge of current condition and future deterioration [4, 5]. This in turn
requires time series trends from evaluation of pavement's surface condition using a
repetitive quantitative method [6,7]. Current technology for assessing road condition is
expensive and often unavailable on poor countries. Local engineers often relay on visual
inspections which are subjective.

There are several generally accepted methods for data collection and condition
assessment, such as laser profilometers used to compute the international roughness index
[7, 8]. Falling weight deflectometers to obtain deflection basin parameters [9, 10], laser
beams capable of obtaining rut depth and fatigue cracks [11]. Other methods have
explore the use of ground penetrating radar [12], among other artefacts. However, this
methods require the use of equipment that in some cases results beyond financial
capabilities of small municipalities or local governments in poor countries.

A low cost method to assess road surface condition is need it to quickly estimate
maintenance and rehabilitation needs, even more when in the presence of gravel and earth
roads. This paper suggest the use of vertical accelerations measured by built-in
accelerometer from a tablet in combination with a GPS application capable of recording
global position and speed. This method is expected to estimate a surface condition
indicator useful for initial implementations of pavement management for earth, gravel
and asphalt roads. This method is combined with visual inspections to estimate possible
treatment for each segment.

Methodology

This study proposes a cheap solution to preliminary assess surface condition of the
pavements of the Province El Oro in Ecuador. This paper deals with those roads
categorized as strategic by the province [13], a summary of their characteristics is
presented on Table 1.

An accelerometer is used to capture vertical accelerations which are expected to correlate

to surface condition. An accelerometer can be found in most tablets and smart phones,
they capture accelerations in three-dimensional fashion, for the purpose of this paper only
vertical accelerations were of interest, although the long range trend of X-accelerations
seem to map well horizontal curves and this could be used for road safety (Figure 1). It
must be noticed that the method herein presented aims to typify average condition not to
identify nor locate damage along the road.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Table 1. Summary of characteristics - Roads in El Oro, Ecuador.
Precipitation (mm) Elevation (meters) Surface Condition
From 317 5 Earth and Gravel Poor
To 2527 3420 Asphalt cement Good

0
2.98E+12 2.99E+12 3E+12 3.01E+12 3.02E+12 3.03E+12 3.04E+12 3.05E+12 3.06E+12 3.07E+12
-1

-2

-3

-4

-5

-6

-7

Figure 1. X-accelerations and horizontal curves [14]

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Observed standard deviations of vertical (Z-axis) accelerations were divided by observed
speed in meter per second. These normalization step reflected the fact that the driver will
drive at a speed that responds to the level of condition of the road's surface. Hence, if the
road is in poor condition, the driver will slow down. Another factor is that of frequency
of logging for vertical accelerations. Vertical accelerations were logged at about 50
observations per second and then collapsed at every second using the standard deviation
of them.

The standard deviation captured variability or spread around the mean in the same units
of the vertical accelerations. The larger the value, the larger the vertical accelerations.
Once filtered by speed, it provided with an estimate of condition (Figure 2).

3.5

Stddev_Accel_Z
3
Normalized_Stdev_Accel_Z
2.5
Z- Accelerations

1.5

0.5

0
700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500
time (seconds)
Figure 2. Comparison of responses with and without speed normalization

In other words, similar values of accelerations for two hypothetical segments, one driven
at high speed and the other at low speed, resulted in different values; as the one with
higher speed was divided by larger speed-range factors therefore resulting in overall
lower levels of the condition indicator (i.e. filtered standard deviation of vertical
accelerations).

The proposed indicator acts in similar fashion as the international roughness index (IRI)
[7,8], lower values are associated with better condition and higher values with poorer
condition.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Data Collection Protocol

There exist several mobile device applications able to log accelerations by taking
advantage of the built-in accelerometers used to control screen orientation on mobile
devices. However, very few are able to log coordinates (latitude, longitude) and speed
together with accelerations. It is possible then to use a separate application to log
coordinates and speed.

The data collection procedure herein proposed uses two freeware android-device
applications, namely: MyTracks and Accelogger [15]. The other application tested was
Sensorlogger [16] for Ipad. Both recorded date/time, x-y-z accelerations, latitude,
longitude, speed and accuracy (in meters).

Data collection started at rest (zero speed) and finished at rest as well, in order to have a
known location given by a GPS unit. MyTracks required somewhere from 2 to 10
seconds to find GPS signals and triangulate the location of the device. A Lenovo thinkpad
tablet was placed horizontally on the floor of a vehicle near the middle of it. Same
vehicle was used for the entire data collection campaign. IT consisted in a 1998 Mazda
pick-up truck. Various vehicles were used for testing how observations vary for different
dumping system (vehicles). It is important to mention that the aim was not to identify and
classify damage (i.e., cracks, rut depth, etc) but rather to estimate a mean condition
indicator per segment with a low cost solution. The idea is similar to that of IRI, but
depends on the trajectory of the vehicle and as such will vary with the path followed by
the driver, however variations should vanish with aggregation and averaging of
observations per segment. Another important factor is that of the surface type and speed.
Heavily damage surfaces will result in lower operational speeds as a measured taken by
drivers to avoid violent movements and minimize vehicle damage. Overall, it was
expected that drivers behaviour could be reflected by speed and condition could be
characterized by vertical accelerations.

The method used for data collection is as follows:

Field work:
(1) Start at rest and set both devices to collect at the same time
(2) Wait for GPS signal
(3) Drive the vehicle non-stopping for 10 minutes, advisable to maintain constant speed
and do not exceed 40kph on horizontal curves
(4) Either at the change of surface type or when 10 minutes are reached, stop the vehicle
and the data collection of both devices at the same type (once at rest). Short changes of
surface type should not be a reason to stop data collection.
(5) On a field-book, register date and time (beginning and ending), spatial location
coordinates, surface type, qualitative appreciation of overall condition, possible treatment
type.

Desk work:
(6) Estimate the standard deviation of vertical (Z) accelerations per second
(7) Estimate speed in meter per second

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 (8) Normalize the standard deviation of Z-accelerations dividing by the corresponding
speed
(9) Obtain a spatial database with normalized Standard deviations of Z-accelerations

Condition
Data

Logger
collects
Accelerations NO Join Z-accel, Coordinates
and
coordinates and speed
Together
?

YES

Estimate St.Dev.
per second

Normalize St.Dev
by speed Spatial database

Figure 3. Summary of procedure

For the case of the Ipad application -SensorLog- both spatial location and accelerations
were collected together. Each segment contained observations for a maximum of 10
minutes. With both tablets the logger took somewhere from 50 to 100 observations per
second. It was observed that the logger took more points on rougher surfaces. The data
was processed to obtain the standard deviation of Z-accelerations per second. For this,
one should estimate how many observations were taken in total and how many seconds
passed from start to end. Figure 3 shows the main steps of the procedure used to obtain
the normalized standard deviation of vertical accelerations, latter used to obtain a surface
condition indicator. Data collection of any segment was stopped with changes in surface
type such that each segment contained only one type of surface.

Analysis of Results
Preliminary results show that the use of a normalized response (i.e., standard deviation
normalized by ranges of speed) are capable of identifying roads at different levels of
condition (good, fair, poor) disregarding of their surface material, as shown by segments
five (s5) and eight (s8) in Figure 4.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Comparison Condition Poor-Good

2.4
Earth poor (s5)
Asphalt good (s8)
1.9
StDevAccelZ

1.4

0.9

0.4

-0.1
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Time (seconds)

Figure 4 Comparison Earth in fair- poor and asphalt in good condition

Comparison of different material segments at same levels of qualitative condition showed

similar values for the normalized response. This empirical result provides an argument in
favour of the normalization by speed. It appears that it is capable of returning a response
able to represent levels of condition (Figure 5).

1.4

1.2
Normalized StDev Z-Accelerations

Fair

0.8
Good
Good
0.6

0.4

0.2

0
6.7E+12 6.8E+12 6.8E+12 6.9E+12 6.9E+12 7E+12 7E+12 7.1E+12 7.1E+12

Figure 5 Asphalt Good-Fair condition

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 A proxy for International Roughness Index
The Root Mean Square is often used to capture variation on cyclical responses of
sinusoidal form. Equation 1 suggests that if the mean is zero, the RMS equation is
equivalent to the Standard Deviation and Equation 2 shows speed normalized RMS and
speed normalized standard deviations of z-accelerations. As shown, either normalized-
measure captures variability on the vertical scale (z), and its units are of frequency (1/s).

1 N 2 1 N
zi zi
2
RMS = a = St .Dev. = (a a )
n i =1 n i =1 [1]

1 N
zi z
2
2 (a a )
RMS 1 a zi N
= z = n i =1
v yi
=
n i =1 v yi v yi v yi

[2]

Where z is the standard deviation of the z-accelerations (ax) if the speed vyi is constant
for all observations used to compute the RMS. For this research, speed was treated as a
constant because there is corresponding value per observation (every second).

A close correlation between the speed-normalized z-acceleration and the international

roughness index (IRI) has been suggested elsewhere [17], values of RMS normalized by
speed and multiplied by 100 could be used as proxy for IRI [17]. For this research values
of speed-normalized standard deviation of z-accelerations were equivalent to those of
RMS normalized by speed, and then multiplied by 100 to obtain a roughness index in
m/km.

Normalization using speed (m/s) was validated using a comparison of observed values
when driving a vehicle at several speeds and at different surfaces. An experiment was set
to measure vertical accelerations in three test segments at 3 speed ranges as summarized
on Table 1. Speed ranges were measured in meter per second and each value of vertical
acceleration was divided by the observed speed in meter per second.

Table 1. Target speeds (kph) for tested surfaces

Asphalt (poor condition) Gravel (fair to good) Earth (poor condition)
40 20 20
60 40 30
20 60 10

A comparison of speed-normalized RMS for the materials and speeds given in table 1 is
shown on Figures 6, 7 and 8.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Gravel Road

0.4
40kph
0.35 20kph
Speed-normalized StDev Z

60kph
0.3

0.25

0.2

0.15

0.1

0.05

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
Distance (meters)
Figure 6. Comparison of speed-normalized standard deviation of Z-accelerations
0.12
asf40kph
asf60kph
asf20kph
0.1
des. est. acle-z norm. Vel

0.08

0.06

0.04

0.02

0 distancia (m)
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

Figure 7. Comparison of speed-normalized Standard Deviations of Z-accelerations

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Earth Road

1
10kph
0.9 20kph
Speed-normalized StDev. Z-accel.

0.8 30kph

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0
0 50 100 150 200
Distance (meters)
Figure 8. Comparison of speed normalized standard deviations of Z-accelerations

It should be noticed that no two trials ran over the exact same path, therefore the values
of speed-normalized standard deviation of accelerations (or RMS normalized by speed)
are close but not the same. This is also explained by the speed effect and vehicles ability
to travel over the complete vertical irregularity (Figure 6, 7 and 8). At lower speeds the
vehicle is able to go all the way down and back up on a given vertical deformation (for
instance a pothole) but at higher speeds the accelerometer is not able to register the
complete vertical variation because it will travel between fewer points of such vertical
irregularity. This can be seen by comparing the vertical profiles of gravel roads at 20, 40
and 60kph in Figure 6.

Comparison of Applications and Devices

IPAD's platform application Sensorlog measures accelerations in terms of the

acceleration of gravity (G) that is as a percentage of 9.81m/s2 (16), therefore to convert to
plain m/s2 scale one must multiply the readings by 9.81. Android's platform application
Acceloger collects accelerations in m/s2 scale as described by the 15.

A test of equivalency among both applications was run; accelerations were measured on a
350m test track twice. A Lenovo Thinkpad tablet and an Ipad 2 tablet were placed
horizontally on the floor of the front passenger of a 2012 Toyota RAV. Figure 9 shows
the profile of accelerations (before speed normalization).

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Readings taken by Sensorlog had their horizontal axis located at -0.96, those of the
Acceloger had their zero axis displaced to 9.5. The effect of both axis was removed
before the calculation of standard deviation take place, this is therefore equivalent to the
root mean square, because the mean either set of observations was zero. Normalization
factor did not matter as it is the same for both sets of data.

It should be noticed that Sensorlog collected about 9 observations per second, meanwhile
Acceloger did nearly 100 per second. In terms of processing capacity, data collection is
limited to segments of about 10 minutes for Sensorlog and theoretically 100 minutes for
Acceloger. Therefore making the latter more desirable for data collection.

4.5
Lenovo
4 IpadBack-axis-9.81

3.5
Accelerations (m/s2)

2.5

1.5

0.5

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450
Distance (meters)
Figure 9. Comparison of accelerations: Acceloger versus Sensorlog. backward

Observed differences between both applications could be explained by the sensitivity of

the accelerometer built into the device (Ipad or Lenovo talet), also by the fact that the
Ipad application collected 10 times less observations per second, which could results in
less sensitivity of the application itselft, therefore exhibiting a tendency of observations
to return to the zero-level, rather the observations collected with the Lenovo presented
more sensitivity and remained at higher levels of variability.

Comparison of Vehicle size

The last experiment consisted in visiting the same test segment on the same day, with 3
vehicles of various sizes, namely a 45 passenger bus, a 12 passenger bus and a two axle
truck.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Figure 10. IRI-proxy for various vehicles on a 1.2 km of asphalt in very poor condition

Figure 11. IRI-proxy for a 180m segment in good condition

Vehicle size do make a difference (specially for trucks) as seen on Figures 10 and 11. IT
was also confirmed that initial and final observations are highly affected by the influence
of y-acceleration on z-accelerations resulting from brake/acceleration from/to rest effects.
Therefore they must be removed. At station 0+900 there was a portion of heavily
deteriorated unpaved road which induced large vertical movements on the vehicles.

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

 Conclusions
A low cost solution is proposed to estimate a proxy for the international roughness index
(IRI) in meters/kilometre. This method is used to capture surface condition on gravel,
earth and asphalt roads in the province of El Oro, Ecuador. The proposed method is able
to produce a repeatable indicator of segment condition, which is able to distinguish
between major stages on the lifespan of any pavement and can theoretically be used to
estimate performance models and develop a management system.

It was found that standard deviation of vertical accelerations normalized by speed in

meters/second are capable of producing an indicator of surface roughness and therefore to
capture road surface condition. Speed did play a strong role in measured roughness, at
higher speeds the measurement seem more consistent are prone to localized damage or
other undesirable elements that could have affected the readings. Dumping system of the
vehicle do plays a role, which is larger with trucks meaning that such vehicles appear to
be more sensitive to road condition and this in turn mean road condition can effectively
impact fragile agricultural goods. All other tested smaller vehicles returned similar
values. Vertical accelerations were found to be affected by horizontal alignment, that is,
horizontal curves, accelerations in x partially counter rest some of the vertical
accelerations. Accelerations in y at the start/end times from vehicles moving from/to rest
increased z-accelerations. More testing is required, primarily to better correlate to IRI,
and to better understand the need for a cleaning algorithm capable of filtering the effect
from such outliers in the form of high and low pass shifters.

This method will be repeated in 2014 and subsequent years to collect data condition in
order to built a database of time series of segment condition. This database will be used
to develop deterioration curves and capture treatment effectiveness.

Location of instrument within the car should be tested in the future by placing the tablet
at different horizontal and vertical locations in relationship with the car's damping
system.

Acknowledgement
This research has been funded by the government of Ecuador through the program
PROMETEO of the national secretary of education science and technology (SENESCYT).
The author is grateful also with personnel, students and faculty of the Universidad
Tcnica de Machala for facilitating vehicles, personnel and equipment to support this
research.

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TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.

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TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal.