Robosense

The Project

The aim of this research study is to determine whether a BBC Micro:Bit can be used to assess different road conditions. The BBC Micro:Bit will be able to sense road conditions in the same way that a human assessor / Engineer can. My method was to test five road sections. I manually assessed all five roads, using a manual test sheet to record all defects. I then programmed a Micro:Bit to start and stop logging accelerometer data.

View this project on YouTube

Team Comments

At the moment road assessments take a very long time because it is done manually by people. These people assess the roads by walking along each part of the road and visually doing inspections. This manual method is expensive and time consuming.

In road drive 3, the Micro: Bit data for a road dip indicates the same as a pothole. This could be because the potholes that we did find were not deep enough. This did not influence my results but points towards future recommendations.

Choose Roads that have no traffic at all. Use a GPS to tag road defects and Micro: Bit data. Choose roads where there are extensive potholes to collect pothole data.