RoadBotics Can Now Find Manhole Covers in Smartphone Videos

Source: Gov Tech Published: June 22, 2020

A startup has created a tool to allow government to catalog things in and beside roads — things like traffic signs, guardrails, sidewalks and manhole covers — by automatically parsing through video taken on smartphones.

RoadBotics, a company spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in 2016, has mostly focused on creating software to allow governments to assess the condition of roads by mounting smartphones in vehicles, recording video of the pavement and then running it through software. Over time it’s honed those capabilities, but now it’s expanding out into further territory.

The concept is one tech companies have taken an interest in in recent years, especially when it comes to curbs. Coord, a startup backed by the Google-linked company Sidewalk Labs, recently undertook a project to help encode the rules of curb use with transportation forms like electric scooters and bicycles in mind.

Keeping track of the many “assets” in and around roads can be a pretty large and arduous task for local governments, who might normally do so through manual observation or outsourcing. The idea with RoadBotics is to make that process faster and easier, which would create better data to help identify what work needs to be done, where and when.

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