Surrey County Council has begun to use AI technology to detect potholes on local roads.
It said it is the first local authority in the country to take the approach, which was cited as one of the public services in which the technology could be used in the Government’s launch this week of its AI Opportunities Action Plan.
Surrey said it is beginning to fit computer vision cameras to the dashboards of highways vehicles to spot the potholes, take photos and feed the images to an AI driven maintenance platform from Route Reports.
This will remove the need for manual inspections of the roads and is expected to make the process of identifying and repairing the potholes safe and more efficient.
The council said that potholes that do not need immediate attention will be regularly tracked, and that it plans to extend the process to dealing with other defects such as missing road signs and the overgrowth of foliage.
It has worked with Route Reports on developing and trialling the software.
Proactive approach
Its cabinet member for highways, transport and economic growth, Cllr Matt Furniss, said: “Adopting this technology will mean we can proactively log and fix potholes, helping to ensure we have well maintained roads across the county for our residents.
“We’re also resurfacing more roads and pavements than ever with 100 miles of roads and 30 miles of pavements resurfaced by our highways teams from April – December 2024 alone. This will make our highway network more resilient which will reduce the number of potholes that develop on our roads in the first place.
“I’m also pleased that we are pioneering AI technology to detect potholes as championed by the Government just this week.”
