Imagine stopping a landslide before it happens.
“They know that there’s a problem, they know it’s affecting mobility, roads are getting shut down, it’s affecting people’s homes,” said Karen Lightman.

Lightman is the executive director of Metro21 Smart Cities, a Carnegie Mellon initiative that joins the research and assets of CMU with municipalities to make living easier…

The city of Pittsburgh is spending millions on remediation and prevention. It’s spend over $500,000 so far this year, with nearly $2 million in awarded contracts…

Turns out, a CMU professor who does work with Metro21 had already been working on the problem.

Christoph Mertz helped start Roadbotics. The company uses a smartphone mounted on a windshield to drive roads, use artificial intelligence to determine their health, then make a recommendation about fixing them before they get too bad.

Mertz is hoping to apply the same technology to hillsides.
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