The winter approaching means a rash of potholes chewing through roads, making for hazardous driving conditions.
As a result, an engineering team from the University of Leeds in England is aiming to program an army of repair drones to fly around and swoop down on roads with potholes, repairing them as they go. The University won a $6.4 million grant to carry through its project.
"We want to make Leeds the first city in the world to have zero disruption from street works," Professor Phil Purnell, of the University's School of Civil Engineering, said in a press release to Fast Coexist. "We can support infrastructure which can be entirely maintained by robots and make the disruption caused by the constant digging up the road in our cities a thing of the past."
To accomplish this, the school will deploy three different kinds of robots. According to Fast Coexist, the University is planning for its group of "Perceive and Patch" robots to scope out roads with potholes and repair them on the spot. If only they were available in New York City.
The engineering team is also working on "Perch and Repair" robots to fix high infrastructure like street lamps and its "Fire and Forget" drones to go underground to work on everything from pipes to metering and inspections.
"Our robots will undertake precision repairs and avoid the need for large construction vehicles in the heart of our cities," Rob Richardson of Leeds University's National Facility for Innovative Robotic System, said in the same release. "We will use the unique capabilities of our robotic facility to make new, more capable robots."
