Startup Revs Up Vehicle Videos to Spot Potholes

Christoph Mertz wants to fix your bumpy ride. His solution — using AI to detect potholes — came as a lightbulb moment inspired by working on autonomous vehicle projects at Carnegie Mellon University. Mertz is now the chief scientist at RoadBotics, which spun out of CMU in 2016 and has since blazed a trail through more than 100 U.S. cities that have adopted its image detection technology to help monitor and improve roads. Based in Pittsburgh, RoadBotics captures video from Android phones placed in the windshield of vehicles to assess road conditions.