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When the wheels of your car hit the edge of a sharp pit with great force, you at least start cursing the city or country government in your mind. But one day you will be able to help fight the pits not only by sending curses, but also by using a special app. At least that’s what researchers at the University of Birmingham think.
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The condition of the knees is now being evaluated by the eye. It may seem strange, but when making decisions about road repairs, often only such an analysis is performed – specialists drive on the roads and compare their condition. It would be nice if that condition could be measured with more data, right? More money could therefore be allocated to those roads that cause more inconvenience to drivers.
Researchers at the University of Birmingham believe that one day any driver will be able to contribute to such data collection. More precisely, his smartphone. These devices are now very popular and even the cheapest smartphones have very accurate accelerometers. These little sensors, which usually help count steps or tell when the phone is shaken, measure acceleration. Therefore, they can accurately determine when the car containing the phone is driving on an uneven surface.
This, by the way, has already been noticed by some drivers: some roads are so uneven that the pedometers start to think that the user is walking intensely.
The phones also have built-in GPS. Therefore, a cheap gadget could not only capture the roughness of the road, but also mark the major problems on a map, which could then be analyzed by the road maintenance authorities. Not all data would be accurate, but if you included multiple drivers, the resulting image would be quite clear.
This idea can be further expanded. Such an app could alert other drivers of an impending section of faulty pavement. This would be especially useful when planning trips.
Such a measurement of the condition of the road surface would be not only more accurate, but also significantly cheaper and more environmentally friendly. For example, US road roughness measurements cost between $ 1.4 and $ 6.2 per kilometer. Also, in places where cold winters still occur, wells appear quite quickly in the spring, and road maintenance organizations are not immediately detected.
Dedicated apps that employ smartphone sensors would be particularly useful for exploring more remote streets. The collected data could be analyzed using artificial intelligence solutions. And the result would help make decisions and inform road users. True, researchers cannot say when such gadgets might be used and whether drivers would be willing to install them on their phones.
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