ASU students developed mobile application designed to improve the quality of roads

The idea to create a project for students arose at the hackathon for IT developers, which was held in Barnaul on April 13–15. The project became the absolute winner of the Hackaton-2018, bypassing 23 team IT projects.

"This project is a team work, which we realized from idea to real working product in 48 hours. This is a mobile application for Android, which can be installed on a smartphone, put in a mobile phone holder in a car and become involved in the monitoring of roads. You drive around the city, and it records potholes, bad road markings, for example, a badly painted pedestrian crossing and other road surface defects. The recording of "defects" is made directly on the mobile device – we process the video stream. If a problematic section of the road is found, the mobile application will transfer the data about the type of "problem area" and the coordinates of the location to the server. The data is processed and compared with information from other drivers. So, we only put the data on the map, if, relatively speaking, ten drivers send us information that there is a "defect" on a particular section of the road. That is, confirmation from the devices of several people is necessary," Yakov Filin said.

Currently, the project is in the phase of MVP – a minimum viable product. It has yet to be finalized, optimized and adapted for other gadgets, however, the basic functionality is already available.

"In the long run, we plan to form a kind of database of problem roads, which will be transferred to the municipal authorities that can solve these problems and to the people who want to optimize their road route, taking into account the quality of roads," the student of Altai State University explained.