Development And Experimentation Using A Low Cost Road Roughness Device

Abstract

Road surface roughness is an important measure of road condition for maintenance of the existing road condition, as it is an important factor for ride quality, vehicle operation cost, travel speed and comfort. Roughness level of road pavement surface is generally represented by IRI obtained by field measurement using BI, MERLIN, NAASRA, ROMDAS etc. In this paper use of three different type of instrument named MERLIN, Auto Level, and new device is described and their results are analyzed to validate the measuring capabilities of the newly fabricated device. As there are a lot of roughness measuring devices are present in the market but they are either costly, difficult in handling or regular calibration is required to operate them. So an attempt has been made to design an economic and easy handling device to measure the roughness of the road