A NEW collaborative project could see the development of an app that predicts destructive potholes – before they occur.
Potholes cause accidents, injuries and tens of millions of pounds’ worth of damage to Scottish cars every year, but now Road Intelligence Ltd, Construction Scotland Innovation Centre (CSIC) and the University of Edinburgh, have got together to try to ease the problem.
Most potholes have to be found manually by foot or vehicular patrols, or by waiting for people to complain, which is costly and inefficient for roads authorities and dangerous for drivers.
The new road defect detection system developed in this project will use data collected via an accelerometer - already a standard part of most smartphones - to identify and characterise road defects using know-how from earthquake seismology.
As well as identifying potholes and displaying their location on a web portal, it will also let road authorities know which minor road defects will soon develop into potholes, allowing them to act before that happens.
The project combined machine-based learning and data science techniques which were developed to quickly analyse the “carquakes” collected by the phones.
Road Intelligence, the lead partner on the project, is a new spin-out company of xDesign, an app development firm.
The initiative, funded by CSIC, has been developed following a successful research and development project between xDesign and Transport Scotland, supported by the Scottish Government’s CivTech Programme.
Road Intelligence will now focus on developing and commercialising the defect detection system, with the aim of creating mobile apps which find road flaws and predict potholes.
Alan Bird, its project manager, said: “Our aim is to create apps which will save the public purse significant sums of money by reducing the need for manual inspection of road defects, reducing the amount paid out in pothole damage claims, and providing a ‘live’ road condition report.
“We are delighted that this collaboration with CSIC and University of Edinburgh has been so successful. We are now talking to two local authorities who want to use the beta product which we expect to be market-ready early in 2019. We hope their experience will allow us to explore the system’s full potential.
“Our initial investigations into international markets suggest significant interest in this new technology, which is great news for the future of the company. We expect it to increase our revenue by £5 million over the next five years, allowing us to create 25 high value jobs over the same timeframe.”
Brenda Joyce, project manager at CSIC, said: “The project has been extremely successful in bringing together industry and academic partners to achieve results which were beyond both their expectations in terms of developing ideas and stimulating future plans for further development and an ongoing relationship.”
Ian Main, from the University of Edinburgh School of Geosciences, said: “This was a very rewarding experience, with interesting and novel results – we had never worked with data from moving sensors before, or moved so quickly from research to a practical application.”
Rob Baxter from EPCC, the university’s supercomputing and big data centre, added: “It’s very exciting to see this move from concept to live application in such a short space of time.”
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