Coleri Research Group

Truck weight data is used in many areas of transportation such as weight enforcement and pavement condition assessment. This study describes a wireless sensor network (WSN) that estimates the weight of moving vehicles from the pavement vibrations caused by vehicular motion.The system has four arrays of accelerometer sensors to measure pavement vibration, and interspersed magnetometer sensors to measure speed.  Sensor output is wirelessly sent to a server, where it is processed to classify vehicles and estimate axle load. 

Different states have different requirements for WIM but the developed system outperformed the nearby conventional WIM, and passes most of the commonly used standards in United States. The system also opens up exciting new opportunities for WSNs in pavement engineering and intelligent transportation.

Top plot shows the raw acceleration signal measured by the reference sensor. Bottom plot shows the average pavement response and the fitted response.

• Bajwa, R., E. Coleri, C. Flores, R. Rajagopal, R. Kavaler, P. Varaiya, B. Wild. (2012). An Experimental Wireless Accelerometer-Based Sensor System for Applications to WIM and Vehicle Classification.Proceedings 6th International Conference on Weight-in-motion - ICWIM6, Dallas, Texas.
• Bajwa, R., R. Rajagopal, E. Coleri, P. Varaiya, C. Flores. (2012). In-Pavement Wireless Weight-In-Motion.Accepted for presentation at the 12th ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN2013), Philadelphia, USA.
• Rajagopal*, R., R. Bajwa, E. Coleri, P. Varaiya, C. Flores. (2013). Sensor Network for Pavement Performance Monitoring. In Proceedings of the ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering, June 23-25, 2013. Los Angeles, CA.