Researcher UTwente uses smartphone to detect potholes

A UTwente researcher has developed a smartphone app that can detect potholes in the road. The app uses the gyroscope and tilt sensor to detect the holes and GPS to store the location of those holes.

The researcher, Fatjon Seraj, is doing his PhD for research into detecting potholes on the road, the university reports. Current equipment to detect potholes is often more expensive and less easy to deploy than smartphones.

To check whether there were really holes in the road, the smartphone also recorded video and audio. These were intended to check whether the points that the program identified as potholes in the road indeed indicated defects in the road surface or whether the software incorrectly indicated a spot with a pothole. The app, RoADS, was correct in more than 90 percent of the cases, the paper shows.

The system has faced many obstacles. For example, the positioning via GPS on a smartphone is often not correct and the sensors also turned out to point out potholes in the road more often than is really the case. Thanks to algorithms that can clean up the data, the software provides useful indications about damage to the road.

The system has recently been tested with, among other things, PostNL on the road and Strukton Rail on the rail. In all cases, the measurements of the smartphones hardly deviated from those of the specialized measuring equipment.

The UTwente is not alone in improving the detection of potholes. BlackBerry company QNX already wanted cars with sensors that would collect data and pass it on to road authorities a few years ago.