With lidar and artificial intelligence, road status clears up after a disaster
Consider the days after a hurricane strikes. Trees and debris are blocking roads, bridges are destroyed, and sections of roadway are washed out. Emergency managers soon face a bevy of questions: How can supplies get delivered to certain areas? What's the best route for evacuating survivors? Which roads are too damaged to remain open? Without concrete data on the state of the road network, emergency managers often have to base their answers on incomplete information. The Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory hopes to use its airborne lidar platform, paired with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, to fill this information gap. "For a truly large-scale catastrophe, understanding the state of the transportation system as early as possible is critical," says Chad Council, a researcher in the group. "With our particular approach, you can determine road viability, do optimal routing, and also get quantified road damage. You fly it,...