Is the road ahead a good or bad one? Asks IIT-B's RoadCare app

Potholes on the Dharavi-Sion Link Road. File pic

What would it be like if a mobile app could give real-time information on the condition of roads? Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay have made this possible through an automated road monitoring system, which classifies road surface quality using crowd-sourced data. The mobile app - RoadCare - can not only help drivers know about bad road conditions and suggest the smoothest route to the destination, but also help civic authorities track the changes in road quality over time.

RoadCare is a smartphone application that can be used by commuters to share road data while travelling. Based on this data, the app classifies the quality of sections of roads as 'good', 'medium' or 'bad'.

"In many situations, commuters may want a smoother route, even if it is longer, over a faster one," said Professor Bhaskaran Raman from IIT-B. He further said, "This could be simply for comfort or due to health reasons because of which they cannot travel on rough roads for a longer duration. It might also be due to commercial reasons like transportation of fragile equipment. In such cases it's important to have information on road quality."

The RoadCare app runs on a type of statistical algorithm called deep neural networks that can learn the relationship between data and categorise it without needing explicit instructions.

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For RoadCare, the researchers used two types of data from phones - accelerometer data, which gives information about movement of the phone, and GPS data, which carries the latitude and longitude coordinates. This data was shared by 20 taxi drivers in Mumbai over six months as they went about their daily trips on a variety of roads. "Since we crowd source the data, the flexibility of having the phone in any direction is important. So, our algorithms are built to be agnostic to phone orientation," said Prof. Raman. As a next step, the researchers are working on improving the integration of RoadCare with Google Maps.

The application continuously updates the latest road conditions based on the data provided by the drivers. Hence, it can be used by civic authorities to record the changes in ratings for road quality over time. So far, RoadCare has used data given by 25 drivers over 15 months.

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