Locating Potholes with Internet of Things Technology Using Cloud Computing Analysis

Many times, when people travel on the road, especially through rain-affected cities, it becomes a constant need to monitor road quality to essentially make sure that there are no unforeseen circumstances. Owing to the gravitation of human needs toward a smart city and the decrepit road infrastructure, the aim of this research is to constantly monitor the road surface to improve the quality and ensure that the car journey is safe. A mobile application has been developed which collects data from the in-built sensors of the phone. The collected data is sent to a database built using Google’s cloud platform, using a socket connection. The socket connection enables the data to be sent in real time. Google’s Firebase Database offers a real-time database, which can be deemed appropriate for this purpose. The analysis involves fetching the stored data, the fetched data is further cleaned and converted into a suitable form. The Z-Thresh algorithm was used to accurately determine the location of the potholes as it considers the minimum value of the z-axis accelerometer as a threshold. The analysis is done over a cloud-based tool, which further informs the authorities about the locations of potholes via SMS so that they can fix them.