Assessing the effectiveness of probe vehicle acceleration measurements in estimating road roughness

Abstract

In this article, we compare roadway roughness measured using a probe vehicle with roadway roughness calculated from the measured profile using an inertial profiler. Roughness is characterised by vehicle body vertical acceleration and probe vehicle roughness index (PVRI), which approximates the international roughness index (IRI) of a full car (rather than a quarter car). The reason the PVRI is used rather than the IRI is that acceleration measurements obtained from a probe vehicle represent the response of the full car rather than a quarter car. An important aspect of this article is that the same physical quantities are compared rather than obtaining a correlation between two different physical quantities. The results suggest that the roughness calculated from probe vehicle measurements is comparable with the roughness calculated from the measured profile; however, the investigation also revealed that data sampling frequency and quarter car parameters, specifically suspension damping and tyre stiffness, can have a significant effect on the measured PVRI.