Potholes are a troubling problem. Just ask scooter company Lime. Lime listed potholes as an official risk to its business in its IPO filing last week.
History is littered with claims that technology can help solve or slow down the pothole problem, and these claims persist today. But as cars increasingly come equipped with sophisticated sensors, they are becoming tools that can quickly alert cities to potholes and other municipal problems.
Last month, Waymo and Waze announced a pilot program to share pothole data with local governments. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it is taking that idea even further with a unique AI-powered product it calls “Ground Intelligence.”
For the past decade, Samsara has provided customers with cameras installed inside millions of trucks to monitor drivers, prevent theft, and assist with claims. The San Francisco-based company took all the data and trained a proprietary model that can detect multiple different types of potholes and determine how quickly they are deteriorating.
The idea is that Samsara-powered trucks will be much more popular than Waymo’s robotaxi fleet, which currently only has about 3,000 vehicles. Even as that number grows, Samsara believes it can collect more data, and importantly, more repeated data from the same locations that shows how potholes change over time.
Samsara believes this data is valuable to cities. The company announced Tuesday that it has contracts with multiple cities, with the city of Chicago joining as a new customer. We also believe this will be the first in a series of insights and data points that Ground Intelligence will provide. Other potential capabilities include detecting graffiti, broken guardrails, low-hanging power lines, and really “anything that can be observed that is relevant to cities and the private sector,” said Johan Lund, Samsara’s senior vice president of products.
Rand said cities typically have to send out workers or sift through hundreds of 311 calls to find such problems. There is a lot of noise. Samsara’s pitch is that it can deliver signals quickly because there are a huge number of commercial trucks and vans already using its cameras.
Ground Intelligence acts as a dashboard. Proactively add warnings on your map about potential potholes and other potential issues. Cities could also pull anonymized footage from car cameras to review citizen reports of downed road signs, clogged sewer lines, or other public infrastructure issues.
“That’s the magic here: taking a process that was reactive and making it proactive,” Rand said. “So instead of just fixing one pothole, make a plan: ‘I know where all the potholes are in this area. I’m going to go out and fix them one at a time, one clean at a time.'”
Samsara is also considering other ways to leverage this mobile municipal surveillance network it has built. The company on Tuesday announced a product called “Waste Intelligence” that makes it easier for waste management companies to quickly confirm whether a customer’s trash or recyclables have been collected. Samsara also announced a “trip management” service that can alert bus drivers to “unexpected trip events” and create a “digital manifest” for school buses.
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