During the Salon des Maires et des Collectivités locales, Suez and Logiroad.ai signed a partnership to offer “intelligent trucks” capable of detecting road defects thanks to artificial intelligence. The data, provided by the household waste collection trucks equipped with Logiroad.ai cameras, will give local authorities access to a continuous analysis of the state of the roads.

Road maintenance is very expensive for the community. “In France alone, it’s 15 billion euros a year,” recalls Yann Goyat, a former researcher at the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Planning and Networks (IFFSTAR), who created Logiroad.ai in 2012 to accelerate the adoption of automated tools and reduce the budget for this maintenance. The company, based in La Chevrolière, south of Nantes, where it employs around twenty people, including fifteen research engineers, has opened an R&D laboratory in Clermont-Ferrand specialising in artificial intelligence: Logiroad.ai. Yann Goyat, CEO of Logiroad.ai, said on this subject:

“We are still on the same line: to computerize and automate the management of road infrastructures in order to minimize costs. Also studying road traffic, since it uses the same tools.”

From data collection to business expertise

Logiroad.ai offers all the necessary tools. First, data collection, which uses image analysis captured from a vehicle “to scan the road and its equipment in 3D.” Then, the data storage with automatic information update. Finally, the expert decision support tool that ultimately allows “scheduling of maintenance work”. The company states that it has acquired a great deal of know-how and technical expertise:

“Our tools are based on artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning. Ten years ago, we were working at the pixel level. Today, we do image processing at the object level. We’ve gained a lot of experience in all these areas.”

The innovative smart truck solution proposed by Suez ( specialist in water and waste treatment) and Logiroad.ai consists first of equipping the household waste collection skips with Logiroad.ai cameras. Then the visual data such as deformations, cracks or even potholes are analyzed by Logiroad in order to provide the local authority with a precise inventory of the situation, enabling it to implement an optimal maintenance plan for its roads.

The Rennes metropolitan area, where Suez is responsible for waste collection, has tested this service on more than 200 km of roadways, as Eric Chavineau, Director of Major Projects and Innovation at Suez, explains:

“We started at the beginning of the year by equipping five household waste collection trucks of Rennes Métropole with cameras, out of the forty or so that we operate.”

Yann Goyat is pleased with this partnership:

“The SUEZ – Logiroad partnership will enable real-time mapping of the state of the roads of SUEZ’s client communities. Thus, local authorities will have total and permanent control over their data to optimize their maintenance budget.”

Suez is already considering the collection of other data by its vehicles. Antoine Bousseau, General Manager of Services to Local Authorities at Suez Recycling and Valorisation France said:

“This intelligent truck solution perfectly illustrates SUEZ’s vocation to support local authorities in their urban development and attractiveness issues, with concrete and innovative solutions. I am convinced that we are only at the beginning of the history of the SUEZ intelligent truck. Today, we offer value-added tippers for road diagnostics, but there are still many opportunities and functions to be invented and developed, particularly for air quality or environmental diagnostics of buildings, for example.”

Translated from Suez et Logiroad.ai s’associent pour optimiser la collecte intelligente des déchets via des camions intelligents