Potholes are a nagging problem—just ask scooter company Lime, which listed them as an official risk to its business in its IPO filing last week.
History is littered with claims that technology can help solve or alleviate the pothole problem, and they still exist. But as cars are increasingly loaded with advanced sensors, they are becoming a tool that can quickly alert cities to potholes and other municipal problems.
Last month, Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program to share pothole data with local governments. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it’s amplifying that idea with its own AI-based offering, which it calls “Terrestrial Intelligence.”
Samsara has spent the last decade giving customers cameras to put inside millions of trucks to monitor drivers, prevent theft and help with liability claims. The San Francisco-based company has taken all that data and trained its own model that can detect many different types of potholes and determine how quickly they’re deteriorating.
The idea is that Samsara-equipped trucks are far more widespread than Waymo’s robotaxi fleet, which currently stands at just 3,000 vehicles. Even as that number grows, Samsara believes it will be able to collect more data and, importantly, more repeat data from the same sites showing how potholes change over time.
Samsara believes this data will be valuable to cities — the company announced Tuesday that it has several cities under contract and the city of Chicago is coming on board as a new customer — and that it will be the first in a series of insights and data points to be offered in Ground Intelligence. Other possible features include detecting graffiti, broken guardrails, downed power lines, or really “anything we can notice that’s related to a city or even the private sector,” said Samsara’s senior vice president of product Johan Land.
Typically, Land said, cities have to either dispatch workers or go through hundreds of 311 calls to find these problems. It’s a lot of noise. Samsara’s pitch is that it can signal quickly, too, because of the huge number of commercial trucks and vans already using its cameras.
Ground Intelligence acts as a dashboard. It proactively populates warnings on a development map of potholes and other potential problems. It also allows cities to pull anonymous footage from vehicle cameras to confirm citizen reports of downed signs, clogged drains or other public infrastructure problems.
“That’s the magic here; it takes a process that was reactive and makes it proactive,” Land said. “That means you don’t go and fix just one pothole. You plan it: ‘I know where all the potholes are in this area.’ I go out and make one at a time, one sweep at a time.”
Samsara is also thinking of other ways to leverage this mobile municipal surveillance network it has built. On Tuesday, it announced a product called Waste Intelligence that makes it easier for waste management companies to quickly confirm whether their customers’ trash or recycling has been picked up. Samsara also announced a “passenger management” offering that can help notify bus drivers of “unexpected boarding events” or create a “digital manifest” for school buses.
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