Potholes cost cities millions: This company uses AI and trucks to fix them

Potholes are an annoying problem — just ask scooter company Lime, which listed them as an official risk to its business in its IPO filing last week.

History is full of claims that technology can help solve or mitigate the problem of drilling, and these claims persist. But as cars become increasingly loaded 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 drilling data with local governments. Now, fleet management company Samsara says it’s furthering that idea with its own AI-powered offering that it calls “Ground Intelligence.”

Samsara has spent the past decade providing its customers with cameras that can be installed inside millions of trucks to monitor drivers, prevent theft and assist with liability claims. The San Francisco-based company took all that data and trained its own model that can detect several different types of potholes and determine how quickly they are deteriorating.

The idea is that Samsara-equipped trucks are much more widespread than Waymo’s robotaxi fleet, which currently numbers only about 3,000 vehicles. Even as that number grows, Samsara believes it will be able to collect more data, and more importantly, more Repeats Data from the same sites shows how craters change over time.

Samsara believes this data will be valuable to cities — the company announced Tuesday that it has several cities under contract and the city of Chicago is coming in as a new customer — and that it will be the first in a series of insights and data points to be presented at Ground Intelligence. Other potential features include detecting graffiti, broken guardrails, dangling power lines, or “anything we can notice that has a connection to a city, or also to the private sector,” said Johan Land, Samsara’s senior vice president of product.

Land said cities typically have to either send workers or sift through hundreds of 311 calls to find these problems. It’s a lot of noise. The idea behind Samsara is that it can deliver the signal quickly, due to the huge number of commercial trucks and lorries that already use its cameras.

Ground intelligence acts as a dashboard. Proactively populates warnings on a map of developing potholes and other potential problems. It also allows cities to pull anonymized footage from vehicle cameras to corroborate citizen reports of fallen street signs, blocked sewers, or other public infrastructure problems.

“That’s the magic here; it takes a process that was reactive and makes it proactive,” Land said. “This means you’re not just fixing one pothole. You’re planning it: ‘I know where all the potholes are in this area.’ I go out and fix one by one, in one sweep.”

Samsara is also considering other ways to leverage the 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’ trash or recycling has been picked up. Samsara also announced a “passenger management” offering, which can help alert bus drivers to “unexpected boarding events,” or create a “digital manifest” for school buses.