Potholes are a nagging problem — just ask scooter company Lime, which listed them as an official risk to its business in its IPO last week.
History is littered with claims that technology can help solve or blunt the problem of potholes, and they still persist. But as cars are increasingly filled 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 potholes with local authorities. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it’s expanding on that idea with its own AI-powered offering, which it calls “Ground Intelligence.”
Samsara has spent the last decade providing its customers with cameras to install in millions of trucks for driver monitoring, theft prevention and claims assistance. The San Francisco-based company has taken all that data and trained its own model that can detect several different types of holes 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 around 3,000 vehicles. Even as this number grows, Samsara believes it will be able to collect more data and, crucially, more repeat data from the same locations showing how holes change over time.
Samsara believes this data will be valuable to cities — the company announced Tuesday that the city of Chicago is already under contract as a customer — and that it will be the first in a series of insights and data points to be offered in Ground Intelligence. Other potential features include detecting graffiti, broken guardrails, low-hanging power lines or really “anything we can observe that has relevance to a city or also to the private sector,” said Samsara’s vice president of product, Johan Land.
Typically, Land said, cities must either send workers or sift through hundreds of 311 calls to find these problems. It’s very noisy. Samsara’s pitch is that it can deliver the signal, and quickly, because of the large number of commercial trucks and vans already using its cameras.
Ground Intelligence acts as a dashboard. It proactively populates alerts on a map of developing potholes and other potential problems. It also allows cities to pull anonymized footage from vehicle cameras to confirm citizen reports of broken street signs, clogged sewers 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 just go and fix a hole. You plan it: ‘I know where all the holes are in this area. I’m going to go out and fix them one by one, in one fell swoop’.”
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, which makes it easier for waste management companies to quickly confirm whether their customers’ waste or recycling was picked up. Samsara also announced a “ridership management” offering, which can help alert bus drivers to “unexpected boarding events” or create a “digital manifest” for school buses.
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