Electric cars. Futuristic cars, self-driving cars that don’t need a human driver.
The evolutions and innovations in the automobile and smart mobility sector never cease to amaze.
What if these increasingly more intelligent cars were able to do also other things, such as mapping the places they drive through? Google Street View cars, with which the Cupertino giant creates the 360° photos of its maps, are the most famous. But they are not the only ones.
In Italy, at Acea we are one of the first companies to use Artificial Intelligence systems to drive our cars.
Andrea Fratini, team Technologies Acea
“It’s an experimental project in partnership with Mobileye, world leader in the development of advanced safety and assisted driving systems, and ESRI” continued Andrea.
The experiment, dating back to 2019, had the objective of testing the use of cars from the Acea fleet to monitor the status and functioning of the electricity grid assets within the territory of Rome.
“We had collaborated with Mobileye in the past, when we installed their safety and assisted driving devices on the cars used by Acea Ato 2 operators” continues Andrea. “Following the very positive response we got from our people, and faced with the opportunity to use an even more advanced technology, we immediately started looking at the feasibility of this new project.”
As part of the experiment, Acea cars will be equipped with the Mobileye 8 Connect device, which in addition to increasing safety behind the wheel, allows to collect data thanks to the use of computer vision and machine learning technologies.
“Every day our operators drive around Rome and intervene where required” referred Delio Svaluto Moreolo, Business Systems Manager in Areti. “Thanks to Mobileye, without asking our operators to do anything extra, we can transform our cars in proper scanners that map our infrastructures located across the territory and collect data on their status and operations.”
While the operator drives around the city, the Mobileye device, through the analysis of the images captured by the on-board cameras (thanks to the image recognition algorithms that use artificial intelligence) connected to the GPS system, identifies assets of interest, for example, lamp posts and electricity substations, and tracks them using vector data, without taking photographs or video footage. Once “identified”, the asset is positioned on a high-definition interactive map and data pertaining to its status are collected.
The project has huge potential also in terms of public utility and evolution for cities. “An opportunity with fascinating development prospects in terms of Smart City services” concludes Maria Letizia Castelli team Technologies Acea.
The trial, which will last for 6 months, regarded 50 cars in Acea's fleet.
During the first stage, approximately one month long, data were be collected and a first mapping were be completed. The data will be analyzed to “teach” the algorithm of learning machines how to map assets correctly. “This continuous feedback and learning phase is the longest, but it is essential to perfect the way the algorithm works and obtain correct data” Andrea explains.
Innovation has no limits. Until a time machine is invented, the easiest way to travel to the future seems to be what we drive every day: our cars.
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