Abstract: Roads are the one of the main transportation system amongst the other especially when we talking about developed and developing countries. India is said to be the fastest developing countries today, our road network is gigantic and said to be only after the USA. But one of the striking underlying facts is the condition of the roads. Since roads indirectly contribute to the economic growth of the country it is extremely essentially that the roads are well laid out and strong. India is home to several bad roads it the metropolitans, the cities or the villages. Identification of pavement distress such as potholes and humps not only helps drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages, but also helps authorities to maintain roads. This paper discusses previous pothole detection methods that have been developed and proposes a cost-effective solution to identify the potholes and humps on roads and provide timely alerts to drivers to avoid accidents or vehicle damages. For that ultrasonic sensors are used to identify the potholes and humps and also to measure their depth and height, respectively. The proposed system captures the geographical location coordinates of the potholes and humps using a global positioning system receiver. The sensed-data includes pothole depth, height of hump, and geographic location, which is stored in the database (cloud). This serves as a valuable source of information to the government authorities and vehicle drivers. An android application is used to alert drivers so that precautionary measures can be taken to avoid accidents. Alerts are given in the form of flash messages with an audio beep.

Keywords: Android application, GSM SIM900, GPS, PIC16F877A, ultrasonic sensors