India is a country of many languages and cultures, but you will find some things in all states and religions. Pits on the roads are one of them.
No matter where you go in India, you will find one or more roads with pits. While Indians have learned to improve their driving skills to compensate for rough roads, many accidents occur around the country.
According to official figures, in 2018, more than 2,000 people were killed and more than 4,000 were injured From accidents caused by pits in India. In addition, there may be many uncontrolled events that may not have occurred.
While Google Maps has improved over the years in charting Indian roads, there is no information about dents and cavities in the road. This is a problem a startup called Intents is trying to solve – and it only needs to use sensors in your phone
Tabrez Alam, Naresh Katchi, Prakash Velusamy and Balasubramanian R. started this company earlier this year with the aim of collecting data about pits and alerting users to avoid accidents.
The firm created a simple application to capture pits using your phone’s sensors, such as a gyroscope and accelerometer. Its algorithm allows a change in the speed of your vehicle and sudden jumps and jumps, to determine if there are pits in some places on a road.
You can install the app, and learn about your business even without registration. The company says it does not need your personal data. And to increase the confidentiality of the data collected, it is stored behind a public key infrastructure (PKI).
The application is based on HERE Maps technology, but you do not need to use it for navigation. You can use Google Maps or any other mapping application, and INTENTS GO The app will alert you to pits through audio.
To track these pits, the company needed too much data. However, due to the coronovirus epidemic, people were not moving around. Therefore, the company encouraged trucks and cabs Operators Installing your driver app in exchange for monetary rewards. In addition to the pits, the company encouraged drivers to record other points, such as police posts, waterlogged locations, and closed roads with photo proofs.
The app works offline, so if GPS is enabled on the phone, it records data and sends it back to the server when a connection is available.
Now, two apps – drivers and regular riders – have more than 120,000 active users, of which over 80% are drivers.
The company claims that its users are mapping over 750,000 kilometers daily – with more than 150,000 pits or speed breakers recorded.
The app also takes care of repaired pits. When more than 10 vehicles pass through a location where a dent was previously recorded, the cavity is removed from the system. The startup claims to remove 30,000 pits per day based on this data.
Intec, head of technology, Kachi said that the next challenge is to measure the severity of the pit to machine learning algorithms. In the future, the app will show colored markers in place of the pits to indicate how deep the pit is. The team is also currently working on an iOS version of the app.
Intense is negotiating with some business partners, such as construction and logistics firms, who would benefit from monitoring road conditions. The intentions are trying to work closely with various government agencies to create dashboards that will help authorities fix road anomalies as soon as possible to avoid accidents.
Published December 26, 2020 – 07:00 UTC