'Carbin' App Uses Crowdsourcing to Measure Road Roughness

A new app called "Carbin” allows users to crowdsource road-quality data — particularly road roughness — with their smartphones. Using the accelerometers found in our everyday mobile devices, Carbin converts vehicle acceleration signals into standard measurements used by most Departments of Transportation. Carbin then collates the measurements onto fixmyroad.us  , a publicly available global map. Learn how the low-cost approach from the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub)  , the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Birzeit University, and the American University of Beirut compares to previous assessment methods.

Transcript

00:00:01 [ Music ]
>> Americans drive around 3 trillion miles each year. That's like traveling to the sun and back roughly 5 thousand times. Yet the roads on which they drive are generally in inadequate condition, and that increases both vehicle fuel consumption and maintenance costs. So in response, researchers at MIT have developed a navigation app called Carbin

00:00:26 that allows users to measure road quality and its impact on fuel consumption. Their aim is to present a new paradigm for road maintenance that could help bring the nation's infrastructure into the 21st century. Despite being the largest of its kind, the US road network is in trouble. In 2001, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave it a grade of D plus, but 20 years later, the grade had worsened.
>> The ASCE Report Card gave the United States civil

00:00:57 infrastructure a grade of C minus. If you zoom in and look at roads in particular, you see the grade is D. If you zoom in a bit more, you see this backlog of unmet backlog needs that's making American taxpayer pay about a thousand dollar more on average every year.
>> While the intuitive response might be to simply spend more, the developers of Carbin realized that even that wouldn't fully eliminate the nation's backlogs.
>> So the problem isn't always in the --

00:01:30 in funding but rather how we allocate our resources. And by knowing road quality for the entire network of roads, which is, right now, with the current technology, is impossible to get, it would allow us to identify an efficient way of fixing roads.
>> To map the nation's roads, the team from MIT, UMass Dartmouth, and Birzeit University sought to develop a tool just as effective as conventional laser profilers and at a fraction of the price. They decided on smartphones not just due to their ubiquity,

00:02:03 but because of what's inside.
>> We are not the first one who has used this smartphone idea to assess road quality, but we are the first to do this is a very scientific way. So what we do is that we analyze the vibration data that is collected by phone's accelerometer to derive road quality metrics and also the impact of road quality on vehicle fuel consumption and environmental impact. The results that we obtain are then uploaded anonymously

00:02:35 to fixmyroad.us website, where it is visualized on a public map.
>> There is a real need for this kind of high-quality data. Since Carbin gather information constantly and in real time, it can show agencies precisely how their roads decay to identify where and when to make repairs with a fixed budget.
>> Carbin started out by connecting the road conditions with the vehicle properties, two domains which before had nothing in common.

00:03:10 In that sense, Carbin will be a platform for different entities to choose what they're interested in. We all have in mind a safe, comfortable, and low-carbon-footprint driving experience. So if you take these three things, Carbin is part of a large picture of sustainable development of our infrastructure of the 21st century. [ Music ]