Vehicle movement on most African roads could be quite frustrating and unpredictable. This is because these roads are made with substandard materials that would debilitate within a short period causing potholes and broken ways. Lots of lives have been lost in road accidents because road users are unaware of the current condition of the roads ahead. To address the problems associated with bad roads, intelligent traffic management infrastructures such as laser scanners and vibrators seem to be a viable solution to the increasing pressure on road infrastructures. However, these applications are expensive and require institutional intervention to setup on highways. The use of navigation maps have been economical for drivers but their focus has been on routing efficiency rather than safety provision. This project proposes a system that takes cognizance of the current state of road infrastructure by detecting potholes on driven roads and communicating road condition to a pothole database as well as oncoming vehicles up to 2 miles away from the spot, along the same road path.

The proposed system is divided into two modules; a pothole detection module and a vehicular communication module. The pothole detection module uses a conventional camera to capture road condition up to 100 meters away from the moving vehicle and processes these images using a pothole detection model that computes at real time. The model will be mapped to a resource efficient architecture suitable for FPGA implementation and an embedded computing environment. The vehicular communication module uses a data communication model to exchange stacked pothole attributes with bypassing vehicles to communicate the condition of the road ahead. Pothole attributes such as size, location, estimated depth and distance are stacked for the last 2 miles and are communicated in sequence to on coming vehicles. This attribute information is also sent to a remote cloud database that serves as information repository.

Project Proposal

1. High-level project introduction and performance expectation

2. Block Diagram

3. Expected sustainability results, projected resource savings