![\"\"](\"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2024\/12\/image003.png\")
Andre Armstrong, a division database manager for the City of Memphis that has been involved in the pilot since it started, said he facilitated the collaboration between the Public Works Division and Google, which hosts the city’s AI model on its cloud platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The cameras send the video footage to an edge device that we have installed on the vehicle,\u201d Armstrong told StateScoop. \u201cOnce that vehicle returns to its home base, it then uploads the video from the edge device over Wi-Fi, and essentially goes to Google Cloud platform, where it processes the machine-learning model and then, using vision AI, determines if these videos contain some of those anomalies.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Armstrong said SpringML, a data analytics and machine-learning company that is now known as Egen, also helped to build the AI model on Google’s platform. He added that the city sent the company thousands of images of the types of infrastructure anomalies the city wanted the model to detect to help to train the machine-learning model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Augustine Boateng, the city’s deputy chief information officer, more trucks are coming in the new year in tandem with the official launch of the program, along with expanded detection capabilities to potentially include broken curbs and gutters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We just want to really get the error level to a minimum, right. So currently, the accuracy when we started was about 60%, but I think currently we are about close to 90% accuracy on the detections,” Boateng told StateScoop, adding that there is also an error-detection mechanism built into the AI model, so that the same pothole or section of high grass is not duplicated as a work ticket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Armstrong said the “idea was to help the City of Memphis Public Works Division to be more preventative in the forms of fixing potholes that arise throughout the year or any other infrastructure issues that are related to the Public Works Division.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said that while the initiative started under the previous mayoral administration, the Public Works Division has the support of Memphis Mayor Paul Young \u2014 who took office at the beginning of this year \u2014 to scale up the pilot program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“That’s one of the highlights for our new mayor, is to kind of bring the city back to a clean, cleaner city that it was known to be at one point in time,” Armstrong added. “So we’re just trying to leverage technology to do just that, help maintain infrastructure and kind of stay abreast of new and upcoming tools that we can leverage.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So far, the AI-equipped trucks can detect potholes, clogged storm drain inlets, high grass and illegally dumped trash.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":68676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4676,20650,24394],"tags":[12,433,1489,5272,5687,25338],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[23807],"class_list":["post-68671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-city","category-data-analytics","category-ai","tag-state-local-news","tag-infrastructure","tag-memphis","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-infrastructure-repair","tag-memphis-public-works-division","author-kquinlan"],"yoast_head":"\n