IIT-Bombay researchers’ app to help you avoid Mumbai’s pockmarked roads – Times of India

MUMBAI: Imagine having a mobile application that will help you avoid potholed roads in the city. A team of researchers from IIT-Bombay have developed exactly that—a smartphone application that will warn you about bad road conditions and provide a better alternative route. The application can also help the civic body track changes in road quality and its maintenance.
The RoadCare application uses crowdsourced data to monitor the quality of road surfaces. Based on the data, it classifies roads as good, medium or bad, depending on their bumpiness—which will appear green, violet and red respectively on the platform. The application uses the accelerometer data (which gives information on the motion of the phone) and the GPS data from the phone. The researchers used raw data collected over a period of six months from cab drivers in and around Powai, to create an algorithm. When the users run this app on the phone, it uses the algorithm to make real-time predictions of the road conditions. The study was initially funded by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD).
The researchers collected the data from several different phones to ensure that the algorithm works well for all phone models. “On testing it, we figured that it can predict the condition of the roads with over 95% accuracy. While other studies may have looked at the potholed roads in terms of numbers, we quantified the bumpiness of the rides. We graded the roads on an 11-point scale, where ‘0’ indicates extremely good and ‘10’, extremely bad roads,” said Ravi Bhandari, one of the researchers who is currently with IIT-Jodhpur.
The application also suggests an alternate route for a smoother ride. “In many scenarios, commuters may want a smoother route, even if longer, over a faster route. This could be for comfort or health reasons, where they cannot withstand rough roads for long, or for commercial reasons such as transporting fragile equipment,” said professor Bhaskaran Raman from IIT-B, who is also involved in the research. Sourabh Tiwari is also part of the team.
The researchers are now looking at improving the integration of RoadCare with Google Maps. “We have recently built a visualisation platform which we plan to open to the public, along with the data we collected on Mumbai roads,” said Raman. The app can be used by civic authorities to keep track of deteriorating road conditions. So far, it has used data given by 25 drivers over 15 months.