Drive-by monitoring for urban streetlights
Is there a streetlight burned out on your block? Unless you or your neighbors phone the right city department, there’s a good chance nobody knows about it. Most cities don’t have any comprehensive listing or map of where their lights are located, what kind they are, what their expected operational lifetimes are, how high they are, or when they were last replaced. And the prevailing system for answering those questions is to send inspectors out, clipboard in hand, to examine the city’s streets one by one — a slow and expensive process. The result of this inefficiency can be that burned-out lights are not replaced promptly, or that perfectly good lights are replaced unnecessarily as a preventive measure, or that crews are sent out with a 30-foot lift truck to replace a light that turns out to be on a 40-foot pole. There must be a better way, a team of researchers...