Artificial intelligence, drones and sensors set to save our crumbling infrastructure

Infrastructure fails. The buzz about flying taxis, futuristic high-speed vacuum tunnels and even autonomous cars apart, in real life essential infrastructure is ageing around the world, with bridges, motorways, dams and tunnels cracking at the seams. It’s a challenge that exceeds the capacity of any maintenance department.

However, new artificial intelligence technology from IBM Research and partners combined with data collected from drones and sensors can help save the day — and patch the cracks in time.

In the United States, one in 13 bridges is considered structurally deficient — which means it has a significant defect that needs urgent repairs or at the very least less weight and reduced traffic speed. That’s 47,052 bridges out of the country’s 616,087 — and, according to a recent report, Americans zoom across these failing bridges 178 million times every single day.

And it’s not just bridges — concrete cracks on motorways and potholes impact the smooth goods delivery, affecting the economy. Tunnels collapsing can trap traffic inside and stay unusable for months or years, leading to congestion on nearby roads, and dams failing can trigger floods.

But spotting cracks in time on miles and miles of highways and countless bridges is not just costly and time consuming, but plain tricky.

Drones take pictures, lots of them. While it can take a human team a month to examine a pillar of a large bridge, a drone can zip around in just a day. IBM researchers have developed an automated navigation system for drones that snap pictures of cracks — and the company’s AI then analyzes the images to spot any potential problems and alert humans to investigate up close.

The drones automatically inspect the full surface and take pictures always from the same angle and at the same distance, rather than a different person snapping photos with a different perspective. This way, it’s then possible to compare images, inspection after inspection, and monitor the progress of cracks over time.

But it’s not just about the drones. IBM is collaborating with Sund & Bælt, the owner and operator of some of the largest infrastructure in the world, and with Sacertis, an Italian firm that has developed a sensor-based monitoring system for bridges, roads and other infrastructure. The three firms are working jointly using several technologies: sensors inserted in structures to spot internal problems, drones that automatically collect high-resolution images at regular intervals, and AI for image interpretation, document understanding, and sensor analysis.