Enabling Road Condition Monitoring with an on-board Vehicle Sensor Setup

Abstract

This paper reports a novel approach for assessing the surface profile of roads utilizing the vehicle level sensor. The sensor is already legally binding installed in modern vehicles with headlights including LED and Xenon lighting sources in Europe due to the automatic luminaire width control. The effective application of the presented sensor setup is validated within a laboratory setup displaying and simulating the quarter-vehicle-model for known surface profiles while comparing the simulated results with measured values from the sensor setup. The results show that the measured data are in accordance to the general characteristic of the signals frequency and slope. The amplitudes derivate slightly due to inertia in the laboratory setup. This paper shows that the approach of utilizing the vehicle level sensor for road condition monitoring works in principle. It is the first step towards a real-time modelling of road conditions from common vehicles utilizing given sensors.