In both developing and developed countries, road networks can be either incomplete or intermittently maintained; therefore potholes are common in such places. Our product, HoleHere, serves as a mapping system for future notifical for all drivers affected by the dangers presented by potholes while also raising the awareness of local governments to the presence of them so that they might be rectified in an efficient manner.
PRODUCT
The Product consists of a set of ultrasound emitter-receiver, an arduino board,a gps and an SD card. Combined they have tha ability to detect potholes on the road and at that moment the geographical coordinates from the gps are saved to the SD card, in other words the location of the potholes is saved. At the moment the product is under development and it is tested using a box instead of a vehicle
HOW IT WORKS
The input subsystem consists of an ultrasound sensor for detecting a pothole and a GPS module for providing the location of an encountered pothole. The process subsystem is an Arduino pre-programmed via a PC. The output subsystem is a SD card used to store the GPS coordinates corresponding to the location of each encountered pothole. The SD card is used to represent the GPS coordinates of the potholes being stored in a road maintenance database.
A sound wave (above 20 kHz) is sent towards an object and it returns after a certain time delay proportional to the distance between the ultrasound transmitter or receiver and the object. The speed of sound in air is known and constant, therefore the object’s distance from the transmitter or receiver can be easily computed using the relationship, distance equals the product of speed and time. For our application the ultrasound sensor is used to detect a sudden change in depth between the vehicle and the road surface by regularly measuring the distance between them. Furthermore ultrasound is a sound wave hence it is immune to ambient electromagnetic interference e.g. visible light, infrared and ultraviolet light emitted by the sun and nearby objects. Also ultrasound sensors are simple, ubiquitous and easy to interface with. This is why we incorporated it in our prototype.
For more information please download our report by pressing the link below
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