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Poor road conditions are not only a nuisance, but also cause discomfort to passengers as well as damage to humans and vehicles. Moreover, though not directly apparent, potholes are one of the leading causes of air pollution and the spread of waterborne diseases. India is a perfect example of a country filled with this kind of poor road conditions; A cab ride in an autorickshaw led us to find out that potholes caused over 34,000 road accidents in our city.
Our mobile app system, Plothole, enables a user to report driving inconveniences like bad road conditions, potholes, bumps, etc. Our app automatically detects these inconveniences on the road, utilizing a gyroscope and accelerometer attached to a car. While a person is driving, with the help of the sensors, bumps and impactful potholes are detected. If the sensor senses a pothole, a signal to the camera at the back of the car is sent. Taking the car’s speed and length into consideration, the back camera takes a picture of the pothole, which is then sent to the user’s app. With the help of GPS, the exact location and time are calculated. Once the user has reached his destination, the app shows all the possible potholes to the user. The user can simply verify if the image is a pothole or not and if it should be sent. This data (image, time, and location) can also be sent to the Public Works Department.
A pedestrian can also use our app to manually click a picture of the pothole and send it to the authorities. All of this data will go to an external website, where this information will be accessible to the public and the concerned authorities. The authorities and the public can see the most reported potholes and work accordingly. This also eliminates false reports sent by only one user.
But, the above-mentioned idea, is supposed to be implemented using sensors and cameras attached to a car.
While making this, we really thought about its practicality and scalability power, hence went forward with the idea. This can be very easily implemented in hundreds of thousands of cars, providing immense amounts of accurate data, for authorities to act upon.
Machine Learning models have also been implemented to detect potholes and bumps much accurately along with their ‘inconvenience intensity’. With so much data, we’ll be receiving from the app, we’ll be able to train that data and slowly completely remove human intervention. (For example - deciding between a speed breaker and a pothole, the image taken from the car’s back camera will be easily classified, without the human having to decide)
We pitched The Plothole Project to the Government of Delhi. In Delhi’s largest road safety campaign, over fifty government officials drove a stretch of 25 km each in their respective constituencies and used Plothole to resolve 1,897 public reports.
Letter of Appreciation by Mr. Manish Sisodia, Deputy Chief Minister, Government of Delhi
Making the announcement, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said 50 teams of MLAs and PWD engineers were being formed to inspect a 25-km stretch each on October 5. They will document potholes and broken patches by using a special software.
The Delhi government will take another shot at making roads under the PWD, spanning across 1,260 km, free of potholes, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced Tuesday. The CM said that the same will be done by carrying out a first-of-its-kind pre-repair survey by joint teams comprising MLAs and PWD engineers.
The Delhi government on Sunday launched a mega drive to fix potholes on roads managed by its public works department (PWD). According to government data, a total of 1,897 reports were filed with the PWD by MLAs through an app launched by the department to complain about potholes and bad roads. The maximum — 1,181 — number of complaints were related to uneven road patches, while the total number 583 potholes were found on city roads.
Aam Aadmi Party MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj told ANI that around 50 MLAs and 50 PWD civil engineers will do a survey of 25 kilometers long road stretches each and will inform the authorities about the same through the mobile application.
