Ex-Ola Marketing VP Creates An App That May Revolutionise Our Roads

You know the feeling when you’re all ready to go out at night or get to work on time and then lo and behold, the road is in the worst possible condition imaginable, leaving you to battle traffic and potholes to make it anywhere punctually. The good news is that this is not something you’ll have to deal with much longer with Sudarshan Gangrade’s new invention called Road MApp.

Ex-Vice President of Ola heading marketing operations created Gangrene’s app to map out the quality of roads with the help of smartphone sensors, and it’s ready to use, all you have to do is download the application which runs as a background app on your phone.

According to The Better India, it switches on automatically when it senses the motion of a vehicle. The application then switches on all sensors, like cameras, GPS, compass and accelerometer, to sense how the road is on the commute. An algorithm with a set of sophisticated signals takes the data collected and removes noise and vibrations not related to the road, and another algorithm takes note of all the potholes, speed bumps and stretches of bad road — the app then comes with a score for the road which is then MApped. Road MApp grades at 7 levels how good or bad are the roads; green means the roads are better, and red signals that you have landed yourself in a pothole. This allows Road MApp to give the government feedback on what roads are a priority to fix.

In a report to Business Insider (BI), Gangrade and his team said that they built the app for the betterment of society, and hope to bring a positive impact to people’s lives. “I was on a break and one day I was talking to my friends and then it struck me if could have an app that assess the quality of the roads,” said Gangrade to BI. The Bengaluru-based startup Lightmetrics helped build the imaging technology that has made Road MApp such a success. “You can download app on Android smartphones and once launched, it automatically knows you are on the road. The sensors assess the vibrations as you drive on good or bad stretches, records the location and a Google Maps-type image is generated that shows the quality of the road,” said Gangrade. “It may not be 100 per cent accurate and we will fine tune it over a period of time but after field testing, we can say that the app is fairly accurate and is reliable.” The app has so far only been tested in Bengaluru, but there will be plans of expansion.