Helping Cities Patch Their Potholes
Waymo
Waymo announced a new pilot with Waze to provide cities with sharper tools to combat a common road enemy: potholes. The pilot program uses Waymo’s perception and physical feedback systems to detect and provide up-to-date information on potholes where Waymo operates, keeping road users safe by alerting them as they approach a pothole. The program, based on feedback gathered from city officials over the years, is intended to help fill reporting gaps and support cities’ efforts to maintain safer streets.
Reducing Aviation Emissions
American Airlines, Google Research, and Breakthrough Energy
American Airlines, Google Research, and Breakthrough Energy teamed up on a project to reduce the global warming effects of contrails using AI. Clouds created by contrails account for roughly 35% of aviation’s global warming impact, over half the impact of the world’s jet fuel. Together, the companies combined huge amounts of data — like satellite imagery, weather and flight path data — and used AI to develop contrail forecast maps to test if pilots can choose routes that avoid creating contrails.
A group of pilots at American flew 70 test flights over six months while using Google’s AI-based predictions, cross-referenced with Breakthrough Energy’s open-source contrail models, to avoid altitudes that are likely to create contrails. After these test flights, they analyzed satellite imagery and found that the pilots were able to reduce contrails by 54%. This was the first proof point that commercial flights can verifiably avoid contrails and thereby reduce their climate impact.
Enhancing City Safety and Mobility with Physical AI
NVIDIA DeepStream and the City of Raleigh
The city of Raleigh, North Carolina, adopted NVIDIA’s suite of smart city planning AI tools in order to scale its infrastructure efficiently and safely while improving vehicle flow, saving commuters time, and ensuring quicker city responses. In a busy city looking to solve traffic congestion, optimizing traffic flow through well-designed signal timing plans remains crucial. Instead of relying on field staff to manually count vehicles and record patterns at intersections, Raleigh adopted NVIDIA DeepStream. DeepStream enables automated vehicle counting and trajectory tracking across key intersections, including during peak hours. This has delivered valuable insights for the city’s traffic engineering team, allowing them to dramatically increase operational efficiency and impact.