Urban Transport

Fully autonomous street crawlers could make potholes thing of the past

View 2 Images
The ARRES Prevent can detect and repair small cracks in road surfaces, before they expand into potholes
Hertfordshire County Council
The ARRES Prevent can detect and repair small cracks in road surfaces, before they expand into potholes
Hertfordshire County Council
The ARRES Prevent prototype has aced its first trial on public roads in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire County Council

Whether you're on a bike or in a car, potholes are a problem. Maintenance is costly and labor intensive, but authorities in the UK have successfully tested an autonomous machine designed to detect and seal surface cracks that can grow into potholes – which could save time and money.

Following four years of research from the University of Liverpool's School of Engineering, a spin-out company was launched in 2020 to develop an AI-driven robotic maintenance system that could autonomously detect and repair potholes and cracks in roads. The project was awarded funding from the UK government's Innovate UK agency in 2021.

Robotiz3d is developing three technologies as part of its Autonomous Road Repair System (ARRES). ARRES Eye was launched last year, and is designed to be installed on vehicles like buses, refuse trucks and maintenance vehicles. As they travel through city or urban environs, the system looks for signs of surface problems on roadways, determines their severity and sorts them into task priority before logging the results on a central database.

The ARRES Prevent setup combines this AI-powered road survey tech with an unmanned robo vehicle that's able to spot small cracks in surfaces and also seal them to prevent potholes from forming due to rain and frost. The company hasn't revealed too much information on the solution, which follows a similar line to Georgia Tech Research Institute's proof of concept from 2012, but we do know that the electric vehicle is about the size of a small van, and can go on patrol day or night.

The ARRES Prevent prototype has aced its first trial on public roads in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire County Council

It features autonomous driving technologies to navigate the streets on its own or can be piloted by a remote human operative. Records of repairs are kept for quality control purposes, and real-time job data can be viewed onscreen back at base. A prototype of this system – which looks like it's torn some pages from the Cybertruck design playbook – has successfully completed its first live trial in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, UK.

"This innovative technology has the potential to transform how we perform road maintenance and enhance the driver experience across Hertfordshire and beyond," said Technology and Decarbonisation Minister, Anthony Browne MP. "It is said a stitch in time saves nine, and that prevention is better than cure – and likewise stopping cracks from growing into potholes could save a lot of future maintenance work."

Further tests of the autonomous road crew will help refine the system ahead of full production, and inform the development of Robotiz3d's third solution – a larger machine called the ARRES Ultra that will be able to deal with larger repairs of both surface cracks and fully grown potholes, including site preparation, filling in the problem areas and then compacting the surface for a smooth finish. The video below has more.

Sources: Robotiz3d, Hertfordshire County Council

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
8 comments
Global
I understand the principle of getting a machine to do the dangerous repairs and patching, but seriously a black wedgie on wheels with not a single warning system or lights, or anything!!! Are the fluorescence garbed humans the walking cones, or are we missing something, some sort of escort vehicle?
paul314
@Global my thought as well: on many/most road crews, the smallest group is the folks fixing the potholes -- you need those flaggers and spotters and drivers. (And likely a setup like this won't be able to get away with robot flaggers, since some motorists will just view them as game targets.) Maybe there are enough roads where traffic goes low enough overnight that you could safely do repairs without a full closure.
Rusty
LOL, in my city, that thing would be slammed into in about 2 minutes after they put it in the street!
Trylon
Good grief, people. Always so quick to trash anything here. What you're missing is that this is a proof-of-concept prototype, not a fully functional production vehicle.
Rustgecko
I agree with Trylon.
This is quite obviously a rather Heath Robinson proof of concept. Give them a decade or so these things will be trundling along at night repairing the roads on their own.
Bodger
You'd need thousands of these just in Edinburgh in the Spring along with hundreds of super-sized units to handle the bus-swallowing potholes...
Cymon Curcumin
It seems quiet enough to work at 2:30 in the morning which would help minimize traffic disruption. It might not be a panacea but if it could keep the roads in better conditions longer it would… oh wait… most of the decisions about road maintenance are made with an eye to keeping people working until the next election that is why the materials and methods used are designed to last just until the next road construction season.
ljaques
Send PA about 90,000 of those and give them ten or twenty years to fix the worst of the potholes in their roads. I'd really love to see these everywhere when they get them working and low-cost.