"Ultimately, sensing the road ahead and assessing hazards is a key building block on our journey to the autonomous car. In the future, we are looking to develop systems that could automatically guide a car around potholes without the car leaving its lane and causing a danger to other drivers. If the pothole hazard was significant enough, safety systems could slow or even stop the car to minimise the impact. This could all help make future autonomous driving a safe and enjoyable reality."
Pothole alert and road repairs
Jaguar Land Rover's research team will also be working with innovation partner Coventry City Council to understand how road profile information could be shared with road authorities, and exactly what data would be most useful for their roads maintenance teams to identify and prioritise repairs.
Councillor Rachel Lancaster, cabinet member for public services at Coventry City Council said: "As part of our ‘Smart Cities' strategy, we will be investigating how Jaguar Land Rover's Pothole Alert system could supply us with data in real-time from thousands of connected cars right across our road network. This could give us a very accurate, minute-by-minute picture of damage to road surfaces, manholes and drains in real time.
"We already collect lots of data which we monitor very carefully ourselves but having this kind of extra information might allow us to further improve our maintenance programmes which would save the taxpayer money."
The project will also investigate whether Jaguar Land Rover's experimental camera could take an image of the pothole or damaged manhole - and share this with the road authorities, together with a GPS location.
"We are just beginning to explore how we could use this technology, but data that includes the severity of the issue, its exact location and an image has huge potential," added Councillor Lancaster. "This is just the sort of information that could help us identify the cause of the problem, prioritise it and contact the owner of the manhole or drain to get it fixed more quickly."
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