Cepton Technologies, an innovative provider of smart lidar solutions, and Vortex IoT, a UK-based IoT solutions company, have combined their skills to turn UK buses into real-time road inspection tools, enabling a lidar-based vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) solution for urban asset management.
Vortex’s award-winning lidar-powered Continuous Urban Scanner System enables asset and infrastructure management by identifying certain situations such as pot-holes, surface damage, and roadside defects in real time by using 5G wireless technology to transmit the data to road management teams.
This solution uses artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside Cepton’s Vista®-P60 high-resolution lidar sensors to create a detailed map of the urban environment. This is done by retrofitting the CURBS product to vehicles to create a real-time 3D scanning and dynamic monitoring system. Mounted on public transportation, such as bus fleets, refuse collection trucks, and mobile enforcement vehicles, the lidar-embedded CURBS product is able to pinpoint areas that may need repair to maintenance teams, allowing for the early identification of issues.
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CURBS streams the processed information over 5G networks. Crucially, this information helps to not only provide real-time insights to services such as road maintenance but also to drive intelligent decisions with the goal of optimizing traffic management, such as enabling preventive measures in accident-prone areas and improving the efficiency of traffic. These anticipated improvements are intended to ultimately help drive down carbon emissions while making cities safer and smarter.
A pilot for the solution is currently underway in the West Midlands in a UK Government-sponsored 5G program called “WM5G”, where Vortex has partnered with National Express and BT.
“The mission of the WM5G Transport team is to support 5G innovation within the region to make transport networks safer, more sustainable, and more intuitive to users,” said David Conner, Project manager at WM5G Transport. “The CURBS project is a great example of how the West Midlands is leading the way nationally in making our cities smarter and better connected. By enabling powerful connectivity to transfer large amounts of lidar and camera data, 5G supports the generation of 3D maps capable of providing the insights required to enhance road safety and guide the development of smart cities.”
Vortex also has additional deployments scheduled with traffic enforcement and smart city management company, Marston Holdings.
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“With vehicles becoming increasingly smarter, city infrastructure also demands next-generation innovations to deliver matching intelligence. Smart city solutions like CURBS are set to become commonplace across our towns and cities,” said Adrian Sutton, co-founder, and CEO at Vortex.
“Public authorities need efficient, scalable ways to manage urban environments, and this becomes even more important as the focus on issues such as decarbonization, sustainability, and climate change grows.”
“At the heart of this is digital transformation and the potential that connected technologies and data analytics present for asset management in real-time. Enhanced use of big data will drive rapid urban planning and dynamic decision-making. Here, perception is key, and nothing can produce accurate 3D data in real-life urban environments quite like lidar – especially the state-of-the-art lidar solutions developed by Cepton, which combine high resolution and long-range while enabling sensor robustness and reliability, making their sensors ideally suited for these types of applications.”
CURBS leverages a number of benefits through its use of Cepton’s Vista-P60 sensors. Firstly, the lidars perform with accuracy and resilience in a variety of weather and lighting conditions. In contrast, cameras need sufficient light to be effective and can be blinded by strong light. Because cameras provide only two-dimensional imaging typically with no accurate size and location data, they need additional computing resources to process the image to extract useful information, which might take up more bandwidth and lead to lag.
Secondly, lidar data is completely anonymized, protecting the privacy of citizens and eliminating the need for additional data management and security protocols. Lidar collects no biometric data, making individual features unidentifiable from lidar point cloud visualizations.
Finally, the Vista-P60 lidars, powered by Cepton’s patented Micro Motion Technology, are non-rotational, mirrorless, and frictionless. This makes it possible for the sensor to deliver high performance while offering a low-power and compact solution to help drive down integration and maintenance costs. The scalability of the Vista-P60 lidars makes them ideal for V2I smart city applications like CURBS.
Dr. Jun Pei, CEO at Cepton, explained: “Advanced sensor technologies have played an increasingly important role in the development of safe, accurate, and intelligent transportation systems. Using our MMT-based lidar solutions, we are pleased to partner with Vortex to enable CURBS to achieve its mission of helping towns and cities across the world become safer, greener, and more efficient for all.”
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