Elgin Sweeper Company has partnered with RoadBotics to offer Florida’s 400-plus municipalities the ability to collect road condition data during sweeping operations, exclusively using Elgin Sweeper street sweepers. The partnership aims to help local government officials managing road maintenance budgets — while facing mounting pressure from citizens to address potholes and other poor road conditions — to make data-driven road improvement decisions.

“Our customers in Florida deploy Elgin Sweeper products year-round to keep their streets clean of debris and sand. These sweepers traverse every road of each municipality on a regular basis. By applying RoadBotics’ technology, we turn each sweeper into a mobile data collection platform that generates a detailed pavement assessment for our customers’ entire road networks,” said Mike Higgins, vice president and general manager at Elgin Sweeper.

Mark DeSantis, RoadBotics’ CEO, described the partnership with Elgin Sweeper as a major step forward in public infrastructure management.

“More than 100 local governments across the United States have switched to our AI technology to assess their road networks because they want the reliable and objective condition data our AI platform generates. Typically, a municipality needs to wait for our team of technicians to arrive in their community to complete data collection. Now, a municipality can become a subscriber of our technology and conduct a pavement assessment immediately using Elgin Sweeper’s fleet of street sweepers,” DeSantis said.

RoadBotics’ pavement assessment technology works by mounting a smartphone to the windshield of a vehicle — in this case, a street sweeper. The smartphone collects images of the road surface using the company’s RoadSense app as the vehicle travels the roads.

The data is then analyzed using machine-learning technology, which identifies road surface damage such as potholes and cracks and results in a detailed, meter-by-meter pavement assessment of the entire road network. Government public works officials then use this data to prioritize pavement maintenance in their community.