Design and Implementation of a Robot for Road Pothole Detection Using GPS

Abstract

The highway system of a developed country contains thousands center line kilometers of streets. Such systems consist of asphalt, concrete or composite streets ranging in condition, in recent years, several road network monitoring and maintenance programs have been established in order to monitor the on-going performance of the road network, to predict future road conditions and assess long term needs, to support investment planning and decision making, and to identify rehabilitation and maintenance treatment. Here in Sudan there is a lack of monitoring for the road performance especially for the inspection of potholes that may lead to direct danger to not just the cars, but the driver of the car himself. There is a need for a technology to sort out this issue and this project is a proposed system that can detect the potholes of the road and determine its location through the longitude and latitude location of the embedded GPS system then sends this location to the database or the observer through GSM. This system is a robot that uses ultrasound sensors to detect the pothole and its depth then uses the GPS module to determine the location of the pothole detected and eventually a GSM to send the data to the observer.