[bradfa]

This is neat! For your "SkyRoads" idea, as an alternative to satellite imagery (which I imagine is quite expensive for high resolution), have you considered partnering with the municipalities who are your customers to outfit their snowplows or garbage trucks with sensors to evaluate the road surface conditions? Since snowplows and garbage trucks have to regularly transit pretty much every public road in many parts of the world, it could be a great way to collect data over time. Plus, if you can make an app for hardware these vehicles already carry (or which can easily and cheaply be added to the vehicles) this might also appeal to your municipal customers even if they don't buy your road resurfacing product/service/etc.

[nonameiguess]

I noticed after purchase my new car warns me of uneven road surfaces looming ahead. As far as I know, it does this by crowd-sourcing from other vehicle owners that have opted into allowing their vehicles to collect this information and send it back to the automaker, which then distributes it to all the other cars. Given this could potentially use every vehicle on the road for data collection instead of just plows and garbage trucks, I'd say the better approach would be for governments to compel automakers to share the road condition data they collect, not necessarily with other automakers, but at least with the governments that have to maintain the roads.

[bradfa]

That's interesting! I fear the privacy crowd wouldn't be huge fans of this idea, so doing it just on municipal vehicles might be easier as a first step. But definitely, collecting data from things which are already driving around in general is a great idea!

[kroil]

Thanks both for very good ideas! We haven’t explored these ideas yet, but definitely interesting thoughts to consider as we build Sky Roads!