Design, Development and Testing of Automatic Pothole Detection and Alert System

Every year several road accidents take place solely credited to the potholes. In this paper, an Automatic Pothole Detection and Alert System is developed using ultrasonic sensor, accelerometer, stereo camera and Global Positioning System (GPS) integrated with Raspberry Pi. The system identifies a pothole, alerts the rider and generates location database of existing potholes. This in turn can create cautiousness in the riders, decrease number of accidents and maintenance costs of vehicles. The experimental results state that the system is able to identify the potholes with 90% accuracy. The cost of the system is around 8000 INR and it reduces average vehicle maintenance cost by 35-50 %. The time taken to send GPS location to the database and send alert to the rider is 4 sec. A strong, city-wise database is generated which can further chisel the system for the entire nation.