Arcadis and Cyclomedia focus on digital road inspections

Consultancy and engineering agency Arcadis and Cyclomedia are launching digital road inspections in the market. Together, both companies are conducting road inspections fully automatically, with the expertise of Cyclomedia in 360°street-level visualizations, combined with the accurate LiDAR Point Cloud and a sophisticated algorithm developed by Arcadis. The two companies announced this on Thursday 25 June.

With this disruptive approach, Arcadis and Cyclomedia set the market for road inspections in motion. The quality is at least as good as the assessment of the average road inspector. In the Street Smart webviewer, the detected road defects can be converted to road segments of hundred or thousand meters. Road managers can define very easily where road maintenance is necessary. And there is no reason to send road inspectors outdoor for inspections. Road managers as Rijkswaterstaat, provinces and municipalities can save a lot on road inspection and they can use the available budgets for road maintenance more efficiently and at the right locations. This ensures more effective road maintenance and less nuisance for the road user.

“We increase the quality, shorten the lead time and reduce the work for the customer, so they can take action very quickly if it turns out that a road section is in bad shape”, says Marc Hartsema, responsible for infrastructure at Arcadis. “We do this with the help of artificial intelligence, which trains an algorithm to recognize road damages on images. Additional effects are safety and environmental benefits because way less vehicles need to be used. We are really proud of it! ”

‘’The expertise of Arcadis on the road surface inspection combined with the imagery and LiDAR Point Cloud from Cyclomedia, makes this partnership unique’’, says Frank Pauli, CEO Cyclomedia. ‘’Our high resolution imagery is excellent for the automatic detection of objects via artificial intelligence. In this case, it concerns road defects, but we also detect, for example, billboards, traffic signs, lamp posts and traffic lights in our images.’’

Both parties started with provincial roads and this will be expanded later this year. The companies also offer this innovation in other countries.