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Analysing an autorickshaw ride in Bangalore

June 21, 2011 · bangalore · analysis · autorickshaw · accelerometer

The bumpy ride on the Bangalore streets triggered a thought the other day, why not log the data and analyse it later(whackily purposeless initially).

The desire to log is esp. a fallout of my recent stint with user studies dealing with data cleaning/analysis and deriving statistical results from it: formally two-way ANOVA tests, T-tests etc. and who doesn’t love clean graphs telling a story :-)

A Bangalore autorickshaw, the test vehicle for this experiment

Without giving much thought, I tied my Macbook Pro equipped with SuddenMotionSensor(SMS) to the auto-rickshaw seat and used http://www.shiffman.net/p5/sms/ to log the X/Y/Z axis data in CSV format. I manually kept a record through a stopwatch about the potholes/pit occurrence during the 25 minute rick-ride.

It was interesting to the see the outliers due to the sudden relative motion triggered jerks.

Route map of the 25-minute rickshaw ride through Bangalore
Route map of the 25-minute rickshaw ride through Bangalore

Ankit and I plotted a few qualitative graphs out of the sampled CSV data(6731 datalogs). I matched the spikes with the manually recorded pothole/sudden-jerk data to see the obvious but visually pleasing results :)

Red color shows the X, Orange shows the Y and Blue shows the Z displacements.

XYZ accelerometer data with spikes at potholes and sudden jerks
XYZ accelerometer data with spikes at potholes and sudden jerks