Video: AutoScan - Vehicle Mounted Pothole Detection System
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
In today’s Google Hangout, Symmetry speaks with five recent BU graduates about their award-winning innovation, AutoScan, a vehicle mounted pothole detection system based on the Gizmo Explorer Kit.
Where are you today? (00:35-00:56)
We’re at Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio for the National Senior Caps Skill Project Conference, a conference held every two years. We’re one of the 13 student groups selected.
Talk to us about your project, AutoScan. What does it do? (00:57-1:53)
It has a few main components:
1. Scanning boards – mounted under the bus to scan for potholes. It will detect and bound those potholes and biometrically analyze them using image-bustling algorithms
2. Gizmo involvement port - It does pretty much all the processes that are onboard. It geotypes the potholes while using the onboard GPS device, and then sends the volume GPS time and date data of the pothole off to a database where our website reads from it. We have Google Maps embedded in our AutoScan website to plot all of the potholes and it also has the ability to schedule repair jobs for municipalities.
What other components do you have in your prototype? (2:04-3:38)
Depth-sensing and camera - main components for pothole-detection. It has an array of infrared LEDs and pulse that are really high frequency. It calculates the phase difference of the affected light into the lens to calculate depth data.
PCB – It powers the system with onboard battery
What are the biggest hurdles you guys had while building the product? (3:00-3:38)
Integration – you buy all components and you buy them specifically because you want them to do something specific and at the end of the day when you try to put them all together to make a working, singular device –things don’t like to talk to each other. We spent a lot of time just getting things to work with each other.
Keeping the device as cheap as possible – because as a student group, we only have a budget of a thousand dollars. We also think it’s important to keep it cheap so it’s easy to buy a lot and detect as many potholes as possible.
What grade are you guys in college? (3:40-3:45)
We all just graduated actually.
What’s the next step for AutoScan? (3:47-4:57)
We started as a student group and we didn’t know this will get as much attention as it already has. Right now, we’ve been focusing on the student stage, just developing the project. But we’ve received so much attention that we’re interested to bring it into development. We’ve talked to patent lawyers, start-up people involved in the business, and we even talked to GE RailRoad who is also interested in the technology for freight locomotives because they have so much track across the country and they have a really hard time finding broking railroad ties. They are interested in the technology to find those potholes as they travel across the country.
In the future, we’re looking just to develop technology and take it as far as we can.
To find out more about AutoScan, or to start developing your own application around the Gizmo Explorer Kit, call Symmetry Electronics at (310) 536-6190, or contact us online.