Detroit will use a Pittsburgh startup’s technology to drive better roads.
Detroit will use a Pittsburgh-based startup’s artificial intelligence pavement inspection technology to assess the city’s 2,600 centerline mile road network in 2019.
RoadBotics on Monday said that Detroit additionally will be the first city to pilot its new AI maintenance tool for unsealed cracks with support from PlanetM, which attracts mobility innovation startups to help solve challenges in Michigan such as pavement management.
“This partnership and pilot will provide us with data and insights about our road conditions that will help our engineers determine where to objectively allocate our resources and maximize investment in maintaining our residential streets in the best condition,” said Oladayo Akinyemi, deputy director of Detroit’s Department of Public Works, in a prepared statement.
The data will be used to expand Detroit’s road asset database as part of its broader data-driven asset management strategy.
RoadBotics spun out of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2016. More than 80 governments across the U.S. and Australia already use its technology to fix the right roads at the right time, saving taxpayer dollars.