Idea: Road Copilot
 

Many times I've been driving at night and ran into street bumps at speed because they're not painted different or due to the lack of good light. In some cases this could harm your car. I thought of an application that might help avoid that.

Initially the app should contain 2 modes:

• Learn Mode
• Assist Mode

Learn Mode:

• Detect Bumps and record their location.
• Detect irregular parts/cracks in the street and record their location.
• For irregular areas, should ask whether it's only on the left, right, or the center of the streets wide.

Assist Mode

• Warn around approaching bump
• Warn about approaching irregular area, and on which side of the street.
• Warn about exceeding a pre-set speed

The app could be later extended to be a client for a full Web Service. Information recorded while learning could be stored on an online database, retrieved by users all around the world.

And don't worry about spam/fake info, since these are going to be auto corrected by other user's clients detecting those fake info. (Like expecting a street bump that never came, client app should immediately auto update the database with that info)

I still did not do any research on this, specially on whether information gathered from accelerometer could be used to identify bumps or cracks in the street (like matching it with a certain pattern or something).

I'd like to gather opinions of the community on this as I plan to propose it as project for GSOC 2010.

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

an app for speed bumps?? i personally dont think its needed , nice to see a users brain working and throwing idears into the hat though

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

an awesome idea, very smart and innovative !
count me in !

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

Doesn't sound too bad, my only uncertainty is with the fact that do we necessarily need this info about speed bumps?

Perhaps this app could collect information about zones where you'd need to slow down, for e.g. around schools and playgrounds. Naturally this is where speed bumps usually are. This way it would IMO "do a bit more" than just tell you to watch out for your car. Hitting a "slow down - children" zone would then alarm you to being generally more observant as well.

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

Such a system could be very useful as a warning system for traffic jams, and police speed controls if a critical mass of users is gathered.

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

i agree the system could work well and there are systems like this that gather info from users out and about

ie sat nav systems using a system like this to gather information about traffic jams and clear roads etc

i have to agree with cjp though i dont think speed bump info is needed maybe speed cams and conjested roads but there allready apps collecting this data or websites that are collecting this data

keep the idears flowing though mate like i say its great to see users coming out with idears like this

iam not knocking your idear and as a user i appreciate idears like this

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

Re: Idea: Road Copilot
 

I like the idea of warning about congested roads. But the problem with is that the app would have to be aware of my exact location, target location, and the road I'm taking in order to show the appropriate info. This is a whole new maps application, like Ovi Maps but with extended features.

About the speed bumps, maybe all the streets are well paved and speed bumps glow at night in your country :). But I'm sure there are places around the world were the case is different. I'd propose my Country as an example :(

Warning about speed cams would be great too