The next time your car bottoms out on a nasty pothole, grit your teeth and try to spare a thought for the people trying to end that problem and smooth out your journey.
Yotta helps local authorities and utility companies understand their Infrastructure - like roads and streetlights - better by surveying and analysing the environment. ZDNet talked to Manish Jethwa, Yotta's chief product and technology officer, to find out more.
ZDNet: How would you describe Yotta and the business you are in?
Jethwa: We're a technology business that has been around for some 25 years in the highways arena. We gather information mainly from manual surveys and we build our own vehicles that go around surveying highways, essentially taking laser measurements of every millimeter across the carriageway of the roads and building up very detailed models of the condition of the road network.
And from there we have progressed to the analysis of that data to try and provide insight for our customers - they can then drill down into that data and extract the key areas where treatment is required; in other words, making strategic decisions about where they are spending their money on the highways Infrastructure.
Over time we have launched out into different asset classes through acquisition and organic growth into things like streetlights.
This has all come together with this Alloy application that we have been working on for a couple of years now.
So this is a matter of mapping the roads and monitoring their condition -- but to what level of detail can you go?
The survey vehicles themselves will connect the information down to the millimeter. And in terms of the height and the texture of the roads, you can get it down to nanometers on the road's surface. It's a very detailed measurement.
Obviously trying to deliver that quantity of data out to the user is not really feasible, so typically you aggregate it up. And then you statistically aggregate it up with 10-metre reporting lengths on a particular lane. You're basically saying, "What is the condition of this 10-metre lane-length?"
How does this all work? Presumably you will work with all the different councils around the country who are customers of yours?
Yes, the local authorities and even the national agencies like Highways England that manage the complex networks of all of the major roads, are our customers.
Previously we'd have been doing the surveys and actually collecting the data but now we are much more focused on the software and services element, and being able to make the most use of that data.
We are somewhat agnostic as to where the data comes from -- whether it comes from censors or comes from surveys that have been conducted out in the field -- and we aim to provide the software that can take all of that data and make the right decisions for them. Or assist them in making the right decisions operationally and strategically.
Is surveying the roads the only way to collect the information?
The survey vehicles are expensive -- they can cost anywhere up to half a million pounds -- because of the range and number of technologies that are on there.
The expense typically means that there aren't that many vehicles around. And in turn that means that the frequency of surveys is low -- up to a year or every couple of years.
Find out more: What is the IoT? Everything you need to know about the Internet of Things right now
And, of course, the IoT will be embedded in new assets as they go out. But it's important that we also embed the sensors into assets that are coming near to the end of their life because it's really those bits of infrastructure that are going through the latter part of their lifecycle that are going to be falling below the service levels that we are interested in.
