Chris Sunde is using his background as a city engineer to develop a system that will afford city road crews the ability to inspect their streets more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost.
Sunde is the founder of Charlotte-based startup GoodRoads. Founded in 2016, GoodRoads' device is a small box that contains a camera, GPS and motion sensors. It magnetically mounts to the hood of any vehicle and uses Artificial Intelligence to inspect up to three lanes of road at a time.
Typically, a city is supposed to inspect its roads on an annual basis, but not only is the process expensive, it's time consuming. Sunde said GoodRoad's device is the solution.
"The most common process is for a person to go out and manually find all the cracks on each road, and it’s a daunting task," he said. "The end-product is kind of unreliable because you’re relying on a human or team of humans to effectively rate hundreds of thousands of roads."
"Our device allows you to hit one road in one pass ... The AI is trained to look for different types of cracks that can trigger different types of maintenance," Sunde added.
The startup is now at the tail-end of a partnership with the city of Philadelphia and SmartCityPHL to pilot GoodRoads' devices during a road quality assessment. Sunde said the city deployed six devices, and in just three months, inspection data from half its streets was collected. Data collection ended in November, and since then the GoodRoads team has been working on analysis to present to the city.
"Our AI gives each road a rating, which goes into our app. In there is also a suite of tools where a city can do its budget, pick roads based on set criteria and quickly see what that’s going to do to their budget and what it’s going to do to the road quality," he said. "It’s all done through our app, so we can understand a broader perspective of how cities across the U.S. are managing their roads."
Sunde said the other important takeaway is the cost-savings, short term and over time. The immediate savings may seem very small — Philadelphia saved only $10,000 sending one person out to drive the roads — but over time, those cost savings will add up.
"Immediately, you'll be able to do this work faster and you'll be collecting reliable data more frequently," he said. "That data is going to help them understand how fast roads are aging and how well the techniques they’re using are working. That’s where you get the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in savings."
The pilot program benefitted GoodRoads, too. Sunde said during an analysis of Philadelphia's road data, the team was able to actively train and quality control the AI to collect information about things like street signs, pavement markings, bike lanes and manholes.
For work done on the pilot program, GoodRoads and the city of Philadelphia are also the recent recipients of three awards — the Harvard Civic Innovation Award, Smart Cities Connect "Smart 50" Award and CompTIA PTI Sustainability Solutions Award.
"[The pilot] is getting a lot of attention," Sunde said.
GoodRoads was also accepted into Techstars Kansas City, which began on Monday. Sunde said it's his hope that participating in the accelerator will help the startup distribute its product to cities more efficiently.
"We’re in the gov-tech category, and it can be a tough one because governments can be hard to sell to," he said. "We’re trying to make our product easier to get into cities, and Techstars can help to streamline the product to get it into their hands and help us achieve our mission of improving roads in every city across the nation."
The accelerator runs through Sept. 2, when each of the 10 companies will participate in a demo day. GoodRoads previously worked with city leaders in Matthews and Charlotte, and has an upcoming project planned in Mount Airy.
