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UK starts early trials of World's first pothole preventing robot
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Considering the state of our roads already, it wouldn’t be surprise me if the pothole robot gets stuck in a big pothole.
It’s also got to survive interactions with the general public, who don’t all seem that keen on autonomous vehicles so far.
You'd think a robot that fixed potholes would be reveered and worshipped. I could see people laying out offerings for the robot so that it is appeased when it visits.
Not arguing with its likely effectivness.
But it seems like this is a plan to keep replaced or repaired roads matianed. Rather then fix current potholes.
I assume someone is making the argument that this is cheaper. Then having staff check every road often enough to catch the cracks before potholes develop.
Unfortunately even if it gained public acceptance. Its hard to imagine any local auth. Investing in preventative maintainance to the extent this would actually work.
Huge work to create areas with fixed roads. Then role out these machines. Would mean like any good idea. It will likely cost much more before is starts showing savings.
And politics is just not set up for people to invest in saving their replacements money.
Road maintenance is one area where I could see preventative maintenance taking off because once your road network gets to a certain size, there's always maintenance that needs to be done. And then when it gets to a certain size after that, you're always trying to be strategic with where repairs and upgrades are made because there's not enough people or money to keep up. Plus, the rest of the network needs to handle the load when you need to shut down a stretch of road to do maintenance.
The benefits of this kind of preventative maintenance are too obvious for it to be dismissed like it is in other cases IMO.
Though on the other hand, this will lead to a situation that is even worse just like widening highways makes things worse, so I wouldn't be too disappointed if they do end up opting to "save money" by not doing this.