Innovative project in West Midlands, UK turns buses into mobile road inspection tools to help build safer, greener and smarter cities

Cepton Technologies (“Cepton”), an innovative provider of smart lidar solutions, and Vortex IoT (“Vortex”), 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.

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Mounted on public transportation, CURBS utilizes lidar to provide detailed 3D point cloud visualizations of each vehicle’s surroundings as it travels. Courtesy of Vortex IoT.

Vortex’s award-winning lidar-powered Continuous Urban Scanner System (CURBS) 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.

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 emission 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.

“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 resource 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 (MMT®), 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 make 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.”

Cepton will participate in the upcoming ITS World Congress 2021 in Hamburg, Germany from October 11^th to 15^th. To learn more about Cepton’s partnership with Vortex and its lidar solutions for smart cities applications, please visit booth B7-135.

About Cepton Technologies, Inc.

Cepton provides state-of-the-art, intelligent, lidar-based solutions for a range of markets such as automotive (ADAS/AV), smart cities, smart spaces and smart industrial applications. Cepton’s patented MMT®-based lidar technology enables reliable, scalable and cost-effective solutions that deliver long range, high resolution 3D perception for smart applications.

Founded in 2016 and led by industry veterans with over two decades of collective experience across a wide range of advanced lidar and imaging technologies, Cepton is focused on the mass market commercialization of high performance, high quality lidar solutions. Cepton is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA, with a presence in Germany, Canada, Japan, India and China, to serve a fast-growing global customer base. For more information, visit www.cepton.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Vortex IoT

Vortex is a young, dynamic and market-leading company at the forefront of smart city technologies. The company builds environmental sensors, networks and data solutions to support decarbonisation efforts globally. As experts in the latest IoT, AI, 5G and LiDAR technology, Vortex enables smart cities & smart infrastructures to become more efficient, safer and greener.

Monitor what matters; Act where it counts. Vortex's sensor technology aims to maximize visibility and delivers the actionable data that businesses need to start making smarter decisions. Air Quality Monitoring, Vehicle-2-Infrastructure Scanning, Remote Infrastructure Management and Smart Parking Systems are Vortex's tailored solutions for progressive smart city management. Powered by AI and enabled by a highly secure decentralised mesh network, all of Vortex’s products guarantee reliability, scalability and environmentally sustainable deployments.

Founded upon a bedrock of innovation, Vortex’s highly skilled team of engineers, technologists and leadership team are constantly developing the eco-smart products of tomorrow, for you today. For more information, please visit www.vortexiot.com.

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