Cost-effectively answering urban data demand by turning city vehicles into data harvesting agents, utilizing simple smartphones and advanced AI-algorithms

About

UNIVRSES Univrses is a 3D Computer Vision and Machine Learning company creating and delivering technologies to build the autonomous future. The Company is based in Stockholm, Sweden, but we work with clients in different industries all over the world. Historically, our focus has been on mobile robotics and autonomous driving, working with companies like Zenseact, ABB, Husqvarna and Ferrari. During 2019, we started developing a smart city platform, called 3DAI™ City. We have recently launched the first version of the platform together with our early adopters at the City of Stockholm, the Swedish Transport Administration and Taxi Stockholm and we are now eager to share with the rest of the world what we have built. 3DAI™ CITY Cities are growing at a rapid pace. In 2030, 60% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas. As urbanization accelerates and populations increase, opportunities as well as challenges await. Vehicles, people and countless construction works have to coexist in the ever-expanding city area. This means there is an urgent need for technological innovation to address evermore pressing challenges. Urban evolution is inevitable and the key to it is data - lots of data. It’s quite simple: The more qualitative data that is accessible, the more complete our understanding will be. Univrses’ ambition is to empower cities and authorities with the timely, relevant and actionable data about their surroundings they really need. Univrses' objective with 3DAI™ City is to give cities and authorities the answer to their pressing demand for urban data. By deploying mobile camera units in fleets of vehicles operating in the city, a constant flow of real-time data about the urban environment can be accessed. Raw images are processed by our computer vision algorithms “at the edge”. From this, we can derive meaningful data (made anonymous) relevant to the successful functioning of the city. Over time, the movement of vehicles and people can be measured, correlated and predicted. This can help reduce traffic congestions, prevent accidents, reduce pollution and localize crime hotspots. 3DAI™ City also makes it possible to detect damage to infrastructure as well as ongoing road works in real-time, which makes it easier for the city municipality to deploy resources more efficiently. Relevant and actionable data is made accessible, simply by deploying a smartphone on a vehicle that is already operating in the city. No special sensing vehicles adding congestion, cost and pollution needed.

Key Benefits

3DAI™ City is both cost-effective and scalable. By enabling cities to turn their fleets into data harvesting agents, cities can extend the usage of current resources and untap new streams of value consisting of much needed real-time urban data. Thanks to the innovative use of standardized hardware, 3DAI™ City requires very low upfront investments from cities, compared to other urban data solutions. On top this, there is no implementation cost or recurring maintenance cost as with static cameras. Instead, from the moment a smartphone installed with the 3DAI™ City app is mounted in the windshield of a vehicle that operates in the urban environment, city officials can start to utilize the actionable data that 3DAI City provides. No system integration is needed, everything is accessible in the web-based 3DAI™ City Dashboard.

Applications

3DAI™ City can be applied to urban planning, traffic planning, operations and maintenance of roads and related assets, on-street parking management. However, this is just the beginning. The beautiful thing with computer vision and deep learning is its versatility. With further annotations and training of the algorithms, this innovation can be applied to almost anything in the future.

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