RoadBump app cost-effectively provides IRI for road maintenance professionals

Updated Sep 19, 2015

Sample RoadBump ScreenRoad maintenance and engineering professionals can now get objective data cost effectively with RoadBump, an Android application from Grimmer Software that measures the roughness of a road using a smartphone.

RoadBump allows road maintenance and engineering professionals to get estimated International Roughness Index (IRI) previously available only through inertial profilers.

Using the Android device’s GPS and accelerometer, the app displays a map of the road and enables zooming, rotating and aligning to graphs, as well as switching the path driven between street and satellite views. The map is color-coded with red sections to indicate very rough segments, yellow for normal roughness and green for very smooth segments.

Tested at the National Center for Asphalt Technology at Auburn University, RoadBump produces estimated International Roughness Index graphs and an accelerometer graph that shows individual bumps, dips and waves.

The road data is collected and stored on the device, eliminating the need for a network connection when recording or reviewing data, which can be exported as a CSV file via email, Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox.

The app covers long distances at normal varying speeds with up to two hours of recording, and saves any portion of a recording as a separate recording.

The IRI values are normalized for speeds between 20 and 70 mph, and the app graphs IRI as moving average or segment average steps. RoadBump exports segment level IRI averages as well as raw accelerometer and GPS data, and exports merged data with position and speed interpolated every 1/100 of a second.

RoadBump is available in the Google Play store or by visiting the Grimmer Software website.