ASSET VISION
BRINGS INNOVATION TO THE WORLD OF ROAD MAINTENANCE AUSTRALIAN-OWNED COMPANY ASSET VISION HAS TAKEN ITS INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT ASSET MANAGEMENT PLATFORM TO A NEW LEVEL USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE LEARNING. ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE LOOKS AT WHAT THIS MEANS FOR ROAD AUTHORITIES, COUNCILS AND CONTRACTORS IN CHARGE OF ROAD MAINTENANCE.
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oad maintenance, though essential for commuter safety, is an arduous task for those involved in the process. For the inspection crew, it often means long hours of driving along regional, state and national roads looking for potholes or broken sign boards along the way. This increases the risk of accidents as inspectors have to get in and out of their vehicle next to moving traffic to record any defects they encounter. That scenario could be changing soon with widespread roll out of an Australianowned road maintenance technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to facilitate such inspections from the safety of a vehicle. The EaglEye artificial intelligence software, which was acquired recently by Asset Vision, can be used by road maintenance teams to map and assess road sections in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods. The software uses footage captured by vehicle-mounted cameras to automatically detect, categorise and assess the condition of road assets, including signs, line marking, trees, and safety barriers, as well as the road surface itself. This means inspectors no longer need to leave their vehicles. Instead, they can travel at the speed of the traffic, resulting in significant improvements in safety and productivity gains. The innovative technology has already been embraced by the Victorian State 32
ROADS FEBRUARY 2022
Government as well as a number of contractors and road operators in Australia, New Zealand and internationally. Victoria’s Department of Transport (DoT) recently completed a trial of Asset Vision’s AI-integrated software to map and assess the condition of more than 4000 kilometres of roads and roadside assets in Victoria’s north-east region. Using this ground-breaking software, the DoT, Regional Roads Victoria (RRV) and their alliance partner DM Roads assessed the condition of more than 160,000 individual road assets across thousands of kilometres of road sections in a matter of weeks. The same job would have taken around three years using traditional methods. “This technology is allowing us to work more efficiently and safely – it removes the need for workers to be out on the roads putting themselves in potentially risky situations,” Victoria’s Minister for Roads and Road Safety Ben Carroll said in a statement. As Steve Bowmaker, RRV’s Regional Director for the Hume Region explains, “We’ve been using AI [technology] in the region to gather critical information about our asset base. It’s a really rapid information acquisition task, that we can now do in hours and days, not weeks and months. “We use the critical video footage [from EaglEye] to pick up all of the assets along the section of the network. That could be
anything from a road sign to road markings, the condition of the road itself and other items of roadside furniture such as wire rope safety barriers,” he adds. In fact, adoption of AI technology on Victoria’s road network has been widely recognised for its innovative approach.
Asset Vision’s EaglEye software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically identify asset inventory and road defects.
