To ensure all Bryan County roads are properly maintained and repaired, county leaders recently utilized the services of RoadBotics, Inc. The firm surveys roads using advanced machine vision and learning to inspect for damages, diagnose road defects, and note potential hazards. Thanks to RoadBotics’ innovative technology, their teams can rapidly identify road issues at a massive scale. The company’s assessment of Bryan County’s roads took less than a day.

Once all the empirical data has been gathered and submitted to the client – in this case, Bryan County – fact-based decisions can be made on which roads to repair first. Bryan County will base its 2019 Road Resurfacing Program on this data. Since RoadBotics’ analyses are based on carefully gathered and notated evidence that pertains to the physical condition of roads, there’s no guesswork. The roads that are in the worst shape are tended to first.

Bryan County Administrator Ben Taylor has been pleased with RoadBotics’ assessment and believes their data will serve as a valuable planning tool for the county.

“We take pride in being careful stewards of taxpayers’ money. We want to make sure we fund the highest-need projects first, but determining what those projects are isn’t always easy. Opinions are subjective,” Taylor said. “But by teaming up with RoadBotics, we’re guaranteeing that the county’s road repair and maintenance program will systematically tackle work in the right order, from most-pressing projects to least. The scientifically gathered data makes us confident that our operations are running in a very straightforward manner.”

RoadBotics teams carried out their assessment in Bryan County on Thursday, Oct. 4. The started near the coast and worked their way inward from there. And Bryan County isn’t the only community in the Coastal Empire to utilize the service. RoadBotics also began working with the City of Savannah in July 2018.

The firm, originally spun out of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute in 2016, came about when CEO Mark DeSantis saw a need to efficiently and effectively monitor and maintain the world's civil infrastructure. In addition to collecting data and performing an analysis, RoadBotics provides its clients with images for every 10-foot section of road and a color-coded map with damage scores for every road segment.