Sensing road roughness via mobile devices: A study on speed influence

This work is part of a project, SmartRoadSense, aimed to estimate the quality of the road surface exploiting the sensors of a mobile device anchored to the car cabin. Using the data of the triaxial accelerometer and the vehicle speed provided by GPS system, it has been shown that an estimate of the quality of road surface can be obtained. In order to improve this estimate, the paper studies the dependence of the mobile device vertical acceleration on the vehicle speed. Using a theoretical model and experimental results, it is shown how the average power of the vertical acceleration and the road roughness index estimated by SmartRoadSense are related to speed.