AI is turning connected cars into pothole-finding machines

Potholes are a big problem – just ask the scooter company Lime, which he named them as a legitimate threat to its business in its IPO filing last week.

Historically, many people have said that technology can help solve or eliminate the problem of potholes, but they still persist. But as more and more cars are equipped with advanced sensors, they are becoming a tool that can quickly warn cities about potholes and other urban problems.

Last month, Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program to share pothole data and local governments. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it’s taking that idea even further with its own AI offering it calls “Ground Intelligence.”

Samsara has spent the past decade providing its customers with cameras to mount in millions of vehicles to monitor drivers, prevent theft, and assist with more. A San Francisco-based company has taken all of that and re-trained its own model that can detect multiple types of potholes and quickly determine how they’re being destroyed.

The idea is that Samsara’s armored vehicles are more common than Waymo’s robotaxis, which currently has close to 3,000 vehicles. Although this number is growing, Samsara believes that they will be able to collect more and, ideally, more information repeat data from the same location that shows how wells change over time.

Samsara believes that this data will be important to cities – the company announced on Tuesday that the city of Chicago already has an agreement as a customer – and will be the first in the list of information and data that will be provided to Ground Intelligence. Other things that can include detecting graffiti, broken shutters, low power lines, or basically “anything we can see that is related to the city, or even private companies,” said Samsara’s vice president of sales, Johan Land.

Oftentimes, Land said, cities have to dispatch workers or sift through hundreds of 311 calls to find these problems. It’s a lot of noise. Samsara’s pitch is that it can signal, and quickly, because of the large number of commercial vehicles and vans that already use its cameras.

Ground Intelligence works as a dashboard. It fills in warnings on the map for potholes and other potential problems. It also allows cities to pull anonymous images from traffic cameras to verify citizen reports of downed street signs, blocked sewers, or other public nuisances.

“That’s the magic here, it takes a process that takes action and makes it sustainable,” Land said. “It means you don’t just go and fix one pothole. You plan: ‘I know where all the potholes are in this area. I go out and fix them one by one, one sweep at a time.’

Samsara is also considering other ways to strengthen the research network it has created. On Tuesday, it announced a product called Waste Intelligence, which makes it easier for waste management companies to quickly verify whether a customer’s waste or recyclables have been picked up. Samsara also announced “passenger management”, which could help alert bus drivers of “unexpected events,” or create a “digital display” of school buses.