National Pothole Day - RoadBotics Puts AI on Pothole Patrol

National Pothole Day is Jan. 15. Its timing is no accident.

All over the Northern hemisphere, potholes are at their suspension-wrecking, spine-shaking worst this month.

Thanks to AI, one startup is working all year long to alleviate this menace. Benjamin Schmidt, president and co-founder of RoadBotics, is using the tech to pave the way to better roads.

His startup — a member of the NVIDIA Inception startup accelerator program — is identifying areas at risk of potholes, so city governments can improve roads before damage worsens.

Schmidt spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how RoadBotics is working with over 160 governments across the world to collect and analyze video data to improve preventative maintenance.

Key Points From This Episode:

Using smartphones placed against car windshields, RoadBotics collects and analyzes video data to assign each road a score, which local governments can use to inform infrastructure decisions.
RoadBotics protects privacy by blurring people, cars and other sensitive data so only roads are analyzed.
Early this year, RoadBotics will be release an app so anyone can use smartphones to collect data and submit to their neural network to help improve analysis.

Tweetables:

“The sooner you can detect [surface distresses], the sooner you can put a cheaper intervention in now that really just saves the life of the road.” — Benjamin Schmidt [5:00]

“RoadBotics was founded at exactly the right moment with the right tech, the right hardware. So we’re now in this sweet spot where we can actually deploy a solution” — Benjamin Schmidt [6:46]

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