Signal processing and conditioning tools and methods for road profile assessment

This work presents a comparative analysis of a few different methods and tools for road roughness assessment and highlights some practical aspects of using sensors and data acquisition tools including experimental data analyses. In assessment of road profile roughness, geometrical and response type measurement approaches with class 1, 2 and 3 tools (Total Station 06 Leica Geo SystemTM, Laser profilometer by DYNATESTTM, accelerometers of DytranTM, smart phone, GY-61 with in-house designed and developed data acquisition system and analog-to-digital converter with ArduinoTM Uno Board, and Roughometer III from ARRB group Ltd) are employed. Road tests are performed in different vehicle velocities, viz. 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 km/h. Comparative studies have demonstrated that the RTM approaches with accelerometers are of sufficiently high quality in assessing road profile and evaluating IRI and can be comparable in accuracy with the class 1 geometrical static profilers and class 2 mobile profilometers like laser profiler by DYNATESTTM.