>> Announcer: From Milpitas, California,
at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE
covering autonomous vehicles.
Brought to you by Western Digital.
(upbeat electronic music)
>> Hey, welcome back everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We are at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicles event
here at Western Digital.
It's part of our ongoing work
that we're doing with Western Digital
about #datamakespossible and all the really innovative
and interesting things that are going on
that at the end of the day,
there's some data that's driving it all
and this is a really crazy and interesting space.
So we're excited for our next guest.
He's Mark DeSantis.
He's the CEO of RoadBotics.
Mark, great to see you.
>> Welcome.
>> Thanks, thanks for having me, Jeff.
>> So just to give the quick overview
of what is RoadBotics all about?
>> Sure, we use a simple cellphone
as a data collection device.
You put that in the windshield, you drive,
it records all the video
and all that video gets uploaded to the Cloud
and we assess the road's surface meter by meter.
Our customers would be Public Works departments
at the little town to a big city or even a state,
and we apply the same principles
that a pavement engineer would apply
when they look at a piece of pavement.
Looking for all the different
subtle little features so that they can get,
first of all, get an assessment of the road
and then they can do capital planning and fix those roads
and do a lot of things that they can't do right now.
>> So I think the economics of roads
and condition of roads, roads in general, right?
We don't think about them much until they're closed,
they're being fixed, they're broken up, there's a pothole.
>> Mark: Yeah.
>> But it's really a complex system
and a really high value system
that needs ongoing maintenance.
>> That's right.
I always use the example of the Romans
who built a 50,000 mile road network
across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Some of those roads, like the Appian Way,
are still used today.
They were very good road builders
and they understand the importance of roads.
Regrettably, we take our roads for granted.
The American Society for Civil Engineers
annually rates infrastructure and we're rated about 28%
of our nation's 11 million lane miles as poor.
Unfortunately, that's-
>> Jeff: 28%?
>> 28%.
And that really means that you need to invest,
we'll need to invest at least a million
to two million bucks a mile to get those roads
back into shape.
So we take our roads for granted.
I'm enjoying this conference and there's one point
that I want to make that I think is very poignant,
is the AV revolution will also require a revolution
in the maintenance and sustenance of our road network,
not just the United States but everywhere in the world.
>> So it's interesting, and doing some research
before we got together in terms of the active maintenance
that's not only required to keep a road in good shape
but if you keep the active maintenance in position,
those roads will last a very long time.
And you made an interesting comment
that now the autonomous vehicles,
it's actually more important for those vehicles,
not only for jolting the electronics around
that they're carrying, but also for everything
to work the way it's supposed to work
according to the algorithms.
>> Andrew Ang, who's an eminent computer scientist,
machine learning, we were spun out of Carnegie Mellon
and he was a graduate of that program,
recognized early on that the quality of the roads
made all the difference in the world
for these vehicles to move around.
We, in turn, were spun out of Carnegie Mellon,
out of that same group of AV researchers,
and in fact, the impetus for the technology
was to be able to use the sensing technology
that allows a vehicle to move around
to assess the quality of roads.
And it's road inspection, really,
is an important part of road maintenance.
The ability to go look at an asset.
Interestingly, it's an asset whose challenge
is not the fact that it can't be inspected,
it's the sheer size of the asset.
When you're talking about a small town
that might have a 60-mile road network,
most and the vast majority of inspection
is visual inspection.
That means somebody in a car riding very slowly
looking down and they'll do that
for tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of miles,
very hard to do.
Our system makes all that very, much more efficient.
The interesting thing about autonomous vehicles
is they'll have the capacity to use that data
to do that very assessment.
So for our company, we ultimately see us
embedded in the vehicle itself,
but for the time being, cellphones work fine.
>> Right.
So I'm just curious,
what are some of those leading indicator data points?
Because obviously we know the pothole.
>> Mark: Yeah.
>> By then things have gone too far
but what are some of the subtle things
that maybe I might see but I'm not really looking at?
(laughs)
>> Well, I think I've changed you right now
and you don't know it.
You're never going to look at a road the same-
>> Oh, I told you, I told you. (laughs)
>> After you hear me talk for the next three minutes.
I don't look at roads the same
and I'm not a civil engineer nor am I a pavement engineer,
but as the CEO of this company
I had to learn a lot about those two disciplines.
And in fact, when you look at a piece of asphalt,
you're actually looking for things like alligator cracks,
which sort of looks like the back of an alligator's skin.
Block cracks, edge cracks, rutting,
a whole bunch of things that pavement engineers, frankly,
and there is a discipline called pavement engineering,
where they look for.
And those features determine the state of that road
and also dictate what repairs will be done.
Concrete pavement has a similar set of characteristics.
So what we're looking for when we look at a road is,
I always say that, people say,
"Well, you're the pothole company."
If all you see are potholes, you don't have a business.
And the reason is, potholes are at the end
of a long process of degradation.
So when you see a pothole, there are two problems.
One is, you can certain blow out a tire
or break an axle on that pothole
but also it's indicative of a deeper problem
which means the surface of the road has been penetrated
which means you to dig up that road and replace it.
So if you can see features that are predictive
of a road that's just about to go bad,
make small fixes, you can extend the useful life
of that asset indefinitely.
>> Right.
So before I let you go,
unfortunately, we're just short on time.
>> Mark: Yeah.
>> I would love to learn about roads.
I told you, I skateboard
so I pay a lot of attention to smooth roads.
>> Mark: (laughs) And you'll pay even more now.
>> Now I'll pay even more
and call the city.
(chuckles)
But I want to pivot off what happened at Carnegie Mellon
and obviously academic institutions are a huge part
of this revolution.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> There's a lot of work going on.
We're close to Stanford and Berkeley here.
Talk a little bit about what happens...
It's happening at Carnegie Mellon
and I think specifically you came out
of the Robotics Institute in something called
the Traffic21 project.
>> Yeah, Traffic21 is funded by some local private interests
who believed that the various technologies that are,
really, CMU is known for around computer science,
robots, engineering,
could be instrumental in bringing about this AV revolution.
And as a consequence of that, they developed a program
early on to try to bring these technologies together.
Uber came along and literally hired 27 of those researchers.
Argo, now...
Argo, Ford's autonomous vehicle now,
is big in Pittsburgh as well.
On any given day, by my estimate,
it's not an official estimate here,
there are about 400 autonomous vehicles,
Ford and Uber vehicles, on Pittsburgh's streets
every single day.
It's an eerie experience being driven around
by a completely autonomous Uber vehicle, believe me.
>> I've been in a couple.
It's interesting and we did a thing
with a company called Phantom.
They're the ones that step if your Uber gets stuck.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> Which is interesting.
(laughs)
So really interesting times and exciting
and I will go and pay closer attention
for the alligator patterns
(laughs)
on my route home tonight.
(laughs)
All right, Mark, thanks for stopping by
and sharing the insight. >> Thanks again, Jeff.
Appreciate you having me.
>> All right, he's Mark, I'm Jeff.
You're watching theCUBE from the Autotech Council
Autonomous Vehicles event in Milpitas, California.
Thanks for watching.
(upbeat electronic music)