The NTRO says Sydney buses are helping identify potholes and road anomalies to improve the city’s road quality
The National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO) has credited Sydney’s bus network has a major tool for finding potholes and other road problems.
The NTRO has been undertaking cutting edge work through its road arm the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) to identify potholes and other ride quality issues around Sydney.
This involves working with Cisco and the University of NSW to trial a new live real-time road condition monitoring system using Cisco routers fitted to public buses operating in the Sydney metropolitan area.
The team is undertaking this work for Transport for NSW.
The system uses the readings from an accelerometer in the router mounted to the Sydney bus fleet as a surrogate for roughness, using information to locate road anomalies based on real-time changes to the ride quality across the road network.
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This system works when buses experience a spike in the acceleration as it drives over a pothole, allowing the road defect to be identified.
These results are then overlayed on a map and displayed as a heat map, showing locations along the bus routes where the acceleration has consistently spiked, meaning investigations can then be carried out.
The NTRO then collects roughness data across a portion of the network to help validate the model.
The NTRO says results have been very successful so far, with the concept being demonstrated at the Cisco Live event in Melbourne in December.