ATLANTA — The city of Atlanta says a road-scanning partnership using artificial intelligence to fix its roads led to 60% of the city’s potholes being fixed by the start of the FIFA World Cup.
At North Avenue and Techwood Drive, crews are replacing pipes.
Channel 2’s Karyn Greer reports this program was so successful, city officials are keeping it on the move.
So if you see cars with a strange device on top, know they’re helping make your future ride a whole lot more smooth.
“This technology is there to let us know one, what’s there, two, the condition of our pavement and our assets,” said Solomon Caviness, Atlanta Department of Transportation commissioner.
Atlanta DOT and startup CYVL are working to fix and maintain the city’s roads.
CYVL uses light radar technology and AI, to survey roads.
“That’s shooting out about 6 million little points per second, and we have a full 3D map of everything that we can see up to like three stories down to centimeters of cracks on the road,” said Daniel Pelaez, CYVL CEO.
It lets city leaders know what needs fixing right now and what will need to be fixed in the future.
“There’s always a human looking at something before we go pave a street,” Pelaez said.
The device can go on top of any car. It measures the width of the road, and things like sidewalks.
“It also takes in vertical elements, so when you think about signs and light poles,” Pelaez said.
Right now, the city takes crowd-sourced reports and validates it with CYVL.
Then that data helps them decide where to spend the money for fixes.
“We built all the technology in house, the hardware, the sensors, the software, the AI,” Pelaez said.
The city says it’s cost-effective and hopes it can help them with a big goal, bringing deadly traffic accidents down to zero by 2040.
CYVL says it blurs out all identifying features if you’re caught on camera, faces, license plates, even pets.
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]