My email to SmartRoadSense was bounced, so I assume the email address has been retired. I have written to the two main developers, that I found on the GitHub page.
Chris
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Roadroid had an app since 2011, so we are probably the longest lasting app for the issue. Whats been seen is the appeance of image detection for road damages. Pottholes is the typical common road user preception of road condition, while road engineers talk about IRI and Cracking, Raveling, Rutting etc.
It depends on the type of decisions to make for the input, on paved roads ther could be (temporary) pothole fixing but also pavement planning. Smartphone apps for roadcondition havent been successfull in crowd sourcing, it needs to many users to be fruitful and and the input from car systems will be impossible to compete with for smartphone app solutions. At least in countries where the built i car solutions will be allowd, probably large parts of the west world.
We still see a market for apps like Roadroid, where road engeineers wants to map a road network quickly in a campain, or on low volume roads/unpaved where not to much crowd traffic can be expected. The use of image detection will definately be a part of the future, but the accelerometer input still important,
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That is great, and also welcome and thanks for posting here!
In OSM we map the overall condition of the surface, and specifically which kind of vehicles (or wheeled contraptions) can use it, as smoothness. This includes potholes, which are probably one of the most common factors that distinguishes poor from good roads, especially for tarmac (see examples), but it’s definitely not limited to potholes. Is this the sort of thing that Roadroid measures?
Any one who enters data into OSM has to agree to make the data available to the public under a highly permissive license, even for non-commercial purposes, so I don’t think the big companies that are collecting data with car systems will allow us to use it. Do you see a market for crowd sourcing in this area? I would love an app that links the accelerometer data to the roads in the OSM database, translates it into OSM smoothness values, probably after a period of calibration, and allows me to upload it to the database after I’ve reviewed it. Some questions would need to be addressed, such as how to average the observations of multiple users for the same road, or the issues that others here have pointed out (e.g. how to deal with a single, easily avoided pothole on an otherwise excellent surface). But overall I think the community might be interested in this sort of thing!
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Hi, Lars. I will read your post shortly, but just wanted to say that it’s great to see you here.
Chris
UK
For info, it sounds like development of SmartRoadSense may be getting reinvigorated. I’ve reached out to the developers.
Chris
StreetComplete comments responding that blog has some extra insights too for interested parties: new Quest: surface smoothness · Issue #1630 · streetcomplete/StreetComplete · GitHub