Development Of Low Cost Road Roughness Using Measuring

Abstract

Today road and transport authorities around the world collectively spend large sums of money each year enhancing and maintaining their road networks. Road users in the majority of countries around the world continue to desire better and smoother roads, despite pressure on road authorities to further reduce expenditure. This pressure is brought about, because funding for road infrastructure is only one of the many priorities competing for Government funds. Pavements cannot be managed to the degree desired by decision makers, unless detailed accurate information and analysis supports the system. Road roughness data is considered one of the most important aspects of road condition information used in practice in pavement management systems. At present in the market, we have various roughness measuring equipments starting from costliest equipment such as ARAN laser (which uses laser beam to measure the roughness) to moderately costly Bump integrator (which uses the bump counts made by the probe wheel), to cheaper equipment such as MERLIN (which uses the slope value of the wheel to calculate the roughness). In the present research work, an attempt is made to develop low cost roughness measuring equipment and to check its reliability and repeatability to minimize the calibration error. It is calibrated using Bump integrator.