DAR ES SALAAM INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND TELECOMMUNICATION

BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING IN ELECTRONICS AND
TELECOMMUNICATION
SENIOR PROJECT II

PROJECT TITLE: ROAD POTHOLES DETECTION AND ALERT SYSTEM FOR

TANROADS
PROJECT TYPE: DESIGN/PROBLEM SOLVING
STUDENT NAME: SYLVESTER R CHIKOTI
REG NO: 160640720134
ACADEMIC YEAR: 2018/19
Introduction
Some of road accidents are caused by drivers trying to escape pothole
located in the lane and tend to move to another lane where chances
are high to vehicles to collide if the communication between drivers is
not good.
If these pothole where to be reported in time, TANROADS as the road
agency would have made plans to amend them immediately.
Unfortunately the mechanism to report exactly location of pothole is
not conducive enough to result good impression in perfection of our
roads
Problem statement
• Difficult in reporting potholes location to TANROADS leading pothole
staying too long before could be repaired.
Objectives
• Main objective:
• To design a system that will report exactly location of potholes in the road to
TANROADS easily.

• Specific objectives
• Establish design requirements
• Design and implement pothole sensing unit
• Design and implement control unit
• Configure and implement GPS, GSM modules and server
• Build the prototype
Literature review
• According to TANROADS policy of 2009, a pothole on the road must
be removed immediately after it has been identified and reported.
• Currently the mode of identifying pothole depends on two major
methods:
• Surveys done by TANRODAS maintenance team
• Reports from road user
• Both of these methods are good but not efficient in saying where
exactly is pothole located.
Literature review cont…
• Some approaches in other countries like India have been done but not
popular
• Moazzam proposed a model for analyzing 3d pavement distress
images.

• Support Vector Machine (SVM) this method distinguishes potholes

from other road irregularities. This methods train SVM with several
potholes images then it uses this intelligence to distinguish potholes.
Proposed system
• Proposed system concentrate in detection and reporting of pothole
location along the road.
• User interface will be designed to display logged data in nicely formatted
manner
• System includes:
• Control unit
• GSM module
• GPS module
• Sensing unit
• Server
• User interface
Proposed system cont..
• Block diagram of proposed system
Data collection
• Data collected from questionnaire proves existence of problem as can
be seen:
Data collection
• Pothole dimension: mostly 40cm wide and 5cm or more deep

• Located magomeni
Data collection
• More pictures of potholes in different angles
Data collection
• Ultrasonic sensor capabilities HC-SR04
• Four pins device consisting of:
• VCC pin
• Ground pin
• Trigger pin
• Echo pin
• Provides 2cm to 400cm non contact distance measurement.
• Operating current: 15mA
• Measure angle: 15 degree
Data collection
• GSM module
• Built with dual band GSM/GPRS based sim900A.
• It has internal TCP/IP stack to enable to connect to the internet via
GPRS.

PARAMETERS VALUE
Voltage and current 5V, 1.5mA
Bands 900/1800 MHz
Dimensions 24*24*3 mm
Data collection cont..
• Controller
• In controller section, atmega 329 micro controller is going to be used
as it has the following properties:
Parameter Value
Operating voltage 5V to 12V
CPU speed 16 MHz
Analog pins input/output 6/0
Digital pins input/output 14/6
EEPROM 1 Kb
SRAM 2 Kb
Flash 32 Kb
Data collection cont..
• GPS
• IS-GPS-200F is chosen for this design as it can
• Get coordinates quick so that they can be sent in
• In time
Data analysis
• Pothole dimension :
• It depends, some have 5cm deep and some go deeper to 40cm.
• Depends on which layer of the road is affected to result given
pothole.

• Compare with ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04

• Ultrasonic sensor can sense up to 400cm deep. It is fine with this
project.
Simulation
• Circuit diagram drawn in proteus simulator
simulation
Web server (HEROKU)
Web interface
THANK YOU