Essential guide for Roadroid 2.

0 – June 2016

Road Surveys using smartphones

Essentials for professional use

June 2016 - App version 2.1.8-

This guide gives a short introduction and briefly describes how to:

1. Collect road roughness data + auto photos or video.

2. Upload data and media from smartphone.
3. View data and media on Road Data Management System.
4. Download files in segments and make charts in Excel.
5. Download data as Shape or KML files to GIS.
Please advise also the guides:

- Roadroid android application detailed guide

- Road inventory user guide
- Road event manager user guide

This user guide requires basic knowledge of Android smartphones, internet and MS Excel.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
Road maintenance and data collection
Road assets management is about optimizing your road maintenance to use your money in the most
effective way. To do that, you need to know the road condition. The Roadroid app measures the road
roughness (IRI) by using the smartphones accelerometer - and can automatically capture
photos/videos of the road. Data is positioned with GPS.

IRI is a global standard for road condition. It can be expressed as a summary of a roads standard.
Other input to your decision support might be traffic volume and other road condition parameters,
as rutting, cracking, edge brakes etc.

IRI is measured with different methods and at Information Quality Levels (IQL), a relative accuracy:

 IQL 1 - Precision profiles (10–20 m intervals expensive and complex to use)

 IQL 2 - Other profilometric methods, as older rolling straight egdes
 IQL 3 - IRI by correlation (Response type measurements - as Roadroid)
 IQL 4 - Subjective ratings/ocular inspections (subjective and time consuming)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Quality_Level

Roadroid collect IRI-data at Class 3 – IQL 3 level.

 Compared to Class 1 Roadroid is very easy to use, portable and cost efficient. It can also be
used where heavy, complex and expensive equipment cannot be used.
 Compared to Class 4 Roadroid is objective and gives a quick and effective data collection with
a powerful visualization on internet maps.

Typical application areas are

- Low Volume Roads / Unpaved roads

- Performance Based Contracts / Highway concessions where you like a continuous input

Within the Roadroid system there is also apps for:

- Road inventory’s of drainage, guard rails, rutting, cracking etc. and

- A Road event manager for inspecting culverts or static road defects.
- Traffic counting, with both an app and wireless sensors

So the Roadroid system offer a complete suit to collect data for your road assets management. It is
not an assets management system but provide an effective input to these systems.

This essential guide is for the 2nd version of the app. Since 2011 the first version of the Roadroid app
has been released in over 30 versions!

The second version of the application is developed and beta tested during the first half of 2016 and
will be in use in the second half of 2016.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
1 Collect data
Install the app on your Android smartphone (Android OS later than 5.0) from:
http://www.roadroid.com/home/app.

Roadroid then needs to register your phone’s IMEI number before you can upload any data. Fill in
your registration details on: www.roadroid.com/registration

Observe:

 The app uses the accelerometer signal from your phone and the sensitivity may vary
between different phones. Default sensitivity is from a reference phone can be adjusted.
 Updating the phones Android operating system may affect the sensitivity and other
application functions. Do NOT update operating system when you have tuned the system.
To make sure this won’t happen - uncheck automatic updates in the android settings menu!
If an OS update is made; you need to check Roadroid app’s settings for the sensitivity or
other functions.

Calibration:

The survey system consists of:

- vehicle (use standard vehicles close to the types you can choose in settings
o Avoid poor or special suspensions (as sport suspension). Use standard tire pressure.
o Make sure all wheels are balanced - unbalanced wheels will make your data useless.
- phone
o accelerometer and sampling performance
o the phones operating system
o the phone mount (important with a stable mount)
- survey speed
o Speed is directly affecting the survey result, therefore maintain consistent speed
o Best correlation for paved roads IQL3/response type methods is around 70-80 km/h
o The system can be tuned for other survey speeds down to 30 km/h and gravel roads.

The system should be tuned on a road with a known IRI value.

 mount phone car rack in the windshield

 horizontally as vertically as possible
 easy to reach and tap on the display
 make sure camera captures the road

It is important to use a good mount/car rack.

If the phone is not steadily fastened, data
will be effected and corrupt. Roadroid currently
recommend Samsung original mount or
Logitec+ (Magnitic).

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
Start Roadroid application by tapping the icon. Press the yellow “fitting” button.

You need to place your vehicle on flat ground to make the fitting. Adjust the phone to X, Y and
Z as close to = 0 as possible. The OK button will turn green when you are within the
tolerances. Press the green OK-button. This procedure is to ensure you pick out the vertical
(Y) accelerations and not influence by braking (X) or turning (Z).

Tip you can always “go back” with the android back-button in the bottom corner of the phone.

The Roadroid app can also measure friction / skidding resistance (the round left/right arrow
button), and it’s shortly described in the end of this guide. Main focus here is roughness/IRI in
combination with auto photos or video.

Capture Photos and Video with roughness (IRI) survey

These surveys are similar. If you do not like to capture any visual information of the road, use the
photo (camera) survey and set the auto-photo capture length to Off (default).

System starts only if a GPS signal is available. Stand still to receive GPS (may take a minute).

While surveying:
- the top bar displays if GPS is connected, time, memory space, angle of phone, bearing
(heading, the direction you are travelling), e/c-IRI values, speed and distance surveyed.
- under 20 km/h the app will show “low speed” and roughness data is not captured
- over 100 km/h it will show “high speed” and roughness data is not captured either
- Photo/video icon button gives technical data about the camera.
- Info button gives current survey info.
- The LED bar (colored squares) gives feedback of roughness classification from green
(good) to poor (black). Login to web login for legends.

Start/Stop survey: Press the record button (black round circle on green background) to begin the
survey and press the same button (now a black square on red background) to stop the survey.

Enter Road Id: You can enter an optional comment or road id when starting survey and decide if
you want to save the survey when stopping. If you enter a text here, it is a good orientation in
Road Data Management System, as it shows up in the import history list.

Menu -> View Statistics: After a survey you are able to monitor the result of the survey as
different charts, this facilitate to make a calibration in the field without uploading your data.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016

A good plan of how to collect data is very useful. Print a map, possibly with the start and stop
sections and Road IDs highlighted. Press start/stop in logical locations as intersections, bridges,
different pavements etc.

Sound in Video: Sound capture is off as default, but it can be activated. It can be used if you want to
comment your survey. I.e. if you see or notice something along the road. Although mind what you
say .

Video resolution: We recommend to use the highest resolution 720 p (default).

Share to Mapillary®: Photos and videos can be shared to www.mapillary.com, by checking that box
under settings. By that you provide content to a global crowd sourced road-view images. The photos
are shared through a common Roadroid account at Mapillary.

The home toolbar button at top right takes you to the Roadroid server with the built in browser.
From here you can view available app updates, manuals, surveys, maps etc.

Exit the app by touching “back button” (down corner) twice.

2- Upload data
Data and photos/videos is saved on phone while surveying. You do not need a continuous connection
or a sim card to make the surveys – but you need one to upload your data after a survey.

Data is relatively small size and can be uploaded through 3G/4G. But to upload media you need a
stable Wi-Fi/internet connection. Connect to Wi-Fi through normal Android procedure.

If you can surf on internet with the phones internet browser – your phone is connected. If not – you
don’t have an internet connection, and will not be able to upload your data.

When you are connected, go to Menu-> Manage uploads. You now have a choice to upload data only
or data and media. The upload progression will be monitored during the upload process.

It might happen that the upload procedure stop/pauses by an interrupt in the network. Just start the
upload again to proceed. If the application seems to have stopped, you can use “reset all”. You can
also pause or cancel the upload process to resume later.

Survey files uploads in seconds, these files are hundreds of kB.

One auto photo can vary in size between 500 kb - 2 Mb. This demands more of the network, and
takes longer time to upload. Estimate how many photos you can capture by the survey length and
auto-photo segment length. We recommend 100 meter, but with a limited network capacity is can
be set to 500 m or even 1 km.

One video file can quickly build up to over 100 Mb, and its transfer can take hours depending on your
networks upload capacity. When collecting video, it is recommended to start/stop survey every 10-
20 km to reduce each video file size.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
When the Upload Data button is pressed:

1. files in /roadroid/pro2/data folder are compressed and moved to /roadroid/pro2 folder.

2. the Roadroid app transfer function starts, and lastly
3. if the file transfer is successful the files should be moved to /roadroid/pro2/backup folder.

This repeats for every file. If one file transfer is incomplete the function will continue next time an
upload is started - until they are successfully transferred.

The files on the phone are encrypted, and will be decrypted in the web import. Make sure you have
enough space on the phone, especially capturing photos/video. Photos and videos; are per default
are deleted from the phone after a successful transfer. It is possible to use a cable make a backup of
photos/videos before transfer.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
3 – View data by the Road Data Management System
When data is successfully uploaded, it will be imported to the web service within 15 minutes. Enter
www.roadroid.com and log-in with your user name and password to view the details of your data.

Depending on if there is a road network layer available – colored road links will appear on the map. If
there are no colored links, you need to check the “GPS-Points” (5).

The time filter (3) is used to display and measure point data only within the set time interval. It can
be used to look at changes over time and obtaining statistics with the report functions.

Navigate (4) allow you to drag the map with the mouse. With draw polygon active, you click on the
map to draw a polygon for an area to calculate. Close polygon by double click (turns orange). Click
"Calculate" to calculate and you should get the percentage of each 4 road classes as Good – Poor and
an average estimated IRI.

 Background: Map or Satellite image.

 The amount of points shown at the same time is limited (for server performance reasons).
 When you zoom in to the map, eIRI – labels will appear at each dot a certain zoom level.
 Photo or video appear as clickable black camera icons. Active photo turns red.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
4 – Download aggregated files
Data is saved in the phone every second between 20-100 km/h - the distance between the “dots” will
vary depending on the speed. To make tables and charts for studies on a road, or to import data to
HDM-4, you need average data in fixed sections lengths. Through the “import history” you can
download the data aggregated in 100 meter sections as text files.

Left: Raw decrypted data in one row per second. Right: Aggregated data in 100 meter sections.

Log in to www.roadroid.com and click ”Import History” (1).

You should see a list of your uploaded and imported files.

Choose “Details” (2), to view the file details: Filename,

Start/stop time etc. Here you have use of your RoadID note.
The filename consists of IMEI no-Survey start time.

There are functions to zoom into the location on a map, and

to “Generate Aggregate file” (3). This operation will create a
.txt file with data in preferred sections. Save or open the file
to copy the data to MS Excel (next chapter).

The measurement can also be saved as a shape-file – giving

the opportunity to build a spatial road database from your
data. The shape file only contains geometry data. You can
also export your survey as KML (inclusive roughness data).

Repeat: Make a good plan for data collection, with starts and stops in logical joints. Its then easier to
make charts, to handle imports/exports and eventual shape file editing can be minimized in your GIS.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
5 – Make charts from aggregated files
Mark all data in the aggregated .txt file, and choose copy. Open MS Excel and paste it (or you can
save the .txt-file and open it in excel). This guide is not teaching basic excel knowledge.

A tip is to name the tab with date and time, and possibly name of the actual section. In the
aggregated file you will find following columns:

DateTime, Latitude, Longitude, Distance(m), Speed (km/h), Altitude (m), Grade (%), eIRI and cIRI and
an eventual RoadID added before starting the survey.

eIRI is an estimated value - cIRI is calculated and its sensitivity and calculation segment length is
adjustable in the app. See here for more information:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141130211746-97325448-roughness-and-texture?trk=mp-
reader-card .

When you have pasted/imported your data in excel, you can start making charts.

The data aggregation length in the web download can be changed between 5 m to 200 meter. 100
meter is a usual import length in HDM.

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
Speed and vertical profile is interesting for a road engineer to get an overall view. And the data can
preferably be used with photos or snapshots from a GPS-video capture:

6 – Spatial data exports

Under file details you have an option to export data in spatial formats as:

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 Essential guide for Roadroid 2.0 – June 2016
- Shape files (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile) or
- KML (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language)

The shape file is only containing the geometrical data (the .shp file of the four files in the zipped
shape directory). The KML is also containing roughness, speed and other attributes.

Please refer to your GIS-resources for working with these files and formats.

Roadroid can also offer custom or automated exports from a survey period and specific survey units.

7 - Friction survey
Press the Friction survey (the left/right arrow button) from the main screen. The screen down right is
showing. Read and follow the steps below.

1. Speed up to at least 50 km/h (below 50 km/h is a big yellow button not able to activate).
2. When speed is above 50 km/h the yellow button change to green record button
3. You can now start the survey by pressing the green record button, button will turn red.
4. Maintain the speed and do not slow down before braking.
5. Brake as hard as possible for at least 3-4 seconds or until the vehicle stops fully.
6. Let go of brake pedal (do not slow down after braking, maintain the speed if still moving).
7. Press the red record button to stop recording.
8. The result is given as an estimated mU.
9. Send the result with the upload button. When the upload button is yellow it is not able to be
pressed. When the upload button is green the friction result can be uploaded. You cannot
start a new survey before an upload is made.
10. A photo of the survey location will be captured if enabled in settings (default). Photos are
uploaded separately by Manage uploads.
11. After the upload button is pressed, you have the option to send/keep (save) this survey or
delete it.

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