Cost Effective Sensor Package for Road Monitoring

Abstract

The companies responsible for road maintenance are expecting an increase in number of roads.It is of interest to find effective solutions to adapt to the increased work in road maintenance.Most of the road monitoring has to be done manually. This thesis is aimed to do research onhow road inspection effectively can be monitored at a low cost. The goal is to create and im-plement a sensor package in a vehicular platform. The group has provided concepts, produceda sensor package for testing, software development and tested chosen areas of interest.Traffic sign recognition, lane mark quality, vibration measurements and light intensity is re-searched and tested. Results are uploaded to a database with associated GPS coordinates andillustrated on a map service program. The maintenance staff can have access to the databaseand a complete overview of the detected states. The sensor package is designed for mounting inseveral vehicles, to avoid special made vehicles for road monitoring.Robot Operating Systemisused to launch and operate the road monitoring system. Most of the system software is writteninPython.The method for sign recognition with red color extraction gave positive results based on thetesting. Lane mark measurement using a 2D camera is shown to work with correct installation.The communication for retrieving and writing data to geospatial database is shown to work properly. The results indicate that lightening conditions and other vehicles affect the resultsin a negative way. In addition, the results indicates that with further work on this topic, it ispossible to monitor road conditions from a low cost and compact sensor package installed in avehicular platform.