>> Announcer: From Milpitas, California, at the edge of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering autonomous vehicles. Brought to you by Western Digital. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicles event here at Western Digital. It's part of our ongoing work that we're doing with Western Digital about #datamakespossible and all the really innovative and interesting things that are going on that at the end of the day, there's some data that's driving it all and this is a really crazy and interesting space. So we're excited for our next guest. He's Mark DeSantis. He's the CEO of RoadBotics. Mark, great to see you. >> Welcome. >> Thanks, thanks for having me, Jeff. >> So just to give the quick overview of what is RoadBotics all about? >> Sure, we use a simple cellphone as a data collection device. You put that in the windshield, you drive, it records all the video and all that video gets uploaded to the Cloud and we assess the road's surface meter by meter. Our customers would be Public Works departments at the little town to a big city or even a state, and we apply the same principles that a pavement engineer would apply when they look at a piece of pavement. Looking for all the different subtle little features so that they can get, first of all, get an assessment of the road and then they can do capital planning and fix those roads and do a lot of things that they can't do right now. >> So I think the economics of roads and condition of roads, roads in general, right? We don't think about them much until they're closed, they're being fixed, they're broken up, there's a pothole. >> Mark: Yeah. >> But it's really a complex system and a really high value system that needs ongoing maintenance. >> That's right. I always use the example of the Romans who built a 50,000 mile road network across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Some of those roads, like the Appian Way, are still used today. They were very good road builders and they understand the importance of roads. Regrettably, we take our roads for granted. The American Society for Civil Engineers annually rates infrastructure and we're rated about 28% of our nation's 11 million lane miles as poor. Unfortunately, that's- >> Jeff: 28%? >> 28%. And that really means that you need to invest, we'll need to invest at least a million to two million bucks a mile to get those roads back into shape. So we take our roads for granted. I'm enjoying this conference and there's one point that I want to make that I think is very poignant, is the AV revolution will also require a revolution in the maintenance and sustenance of our road network, not just the United States but everywhere in the world. >> So it's interesting, and doing some research before we got together in terms of the active maintenance that's not only required to keep a road in good shape but if you keep the active maintenance in position, those roads will last a very long time. And you made an interesting comment that now the autonomous vehicles, it's actually more important for those vehicles, not only for jolting the electronics around that they're carrying, but also for everything to work the way it's supposed to work according to the algorithms. >> Andrew Ang, who's an eminent computer scientist, machine learning, we were spun out of Carnegie Mellon and he was a graduate of that program, recognized early on that the quality of the roads made all the difference in the world for these vehicles to move around. We, in turn, were spun out of Carnegie Mellon, out of that same group of AV researchers, and in fact, the impetus for the technology was to be able to use the sensing technology that allows a vehicle to move around to assess the quality of roads. And it's road inspection, really, is an important part of road maintenance. The ability to go look at an asset. Interestingly, it's an asset whose challenge is not the fact that it can't be inspected, it's the sheer size of the asset. When you're talking about a small town that might have a 60-mile road network, most and the vast majority of inspection is visual inspection. That means somebody in a car riding very slowly looking down and they'll do that for tens, thousands, hundreds of thousands of miles, very hard to do. Our system makes all that very, much more efficient. The interesting thing about autonomous vehicles is they'll have the capacity to use that data to do that very assessment. So for our company, we ultimately see us embedded in the vehicle itself, but for the time being, cellphones work fine. >> Right. So I'm just curious, what are some of those leading indicator data points? Because obviously we know the pothole. >> Mark: Yeah. >> By then things have gone too far but what are some of the subtle things that maybe I might see but I'm not really looking at? (laughs) >> Well, I think I've changed you right now and you don't know it. You're never going to look at a road the same- >> Oh, I told you, I told you. (laughs) >> After you hear me talk for the next three minutes. I don't look at roads the same and I'm not a civil engineer nor am I a pavement engineer, but as the CEO of this company I had to learn a lot about those two disciplines. And in fact, when you look at a piece of asphalt, you're actually looking for things like alligator cracks, which sort of looks like the back of an alligator's skin. Block cracks, edge cracks, rutting, a whole bunch of things that pavement engineers, frankly, and there is a discipline called pavement engineering, where they look for. And those features determine the state of that road and also dictate what repairs will be done. Concrete pavement has a similar set of characteristics. So what we're looking for when we look at a road is, I always say that, people say, "Well, you're the pothole company." If all you see are potholes, you don't have a business. And the reason is, potholes are at the end of a long process of degradation. So when you see a pothole, there are two problems. One is, you can certain blow out a tire or break an axle on that pothole but also it's indicative of a deeper problem which means the surface of the road has been penetrated which means you to dig up that road and replace it. So if you can see features that are predictive of a road that's just about to go bad, make small fixes, you can extend the useful life of that asset indefinitely. >> Right. So before I let you go, unfortunately, we're just short on time. >> Mark: Yeah. >> I would love to learn about roads. I told you, I skateboard so I pay a lot of attention to smooth roads. >> Mark: (laughs) And you'll pay even more now. >> Now I'll pay even more and call the city. (chuckles) But I want to pivot off what happened at Carnegie Mellon and obviously academic institutions are a huge part of this revolution. >> Yeah, yeah. >> There's a lot of work going on. We're close to Stanford and Berkeley here. Talk a little bit about what happens... It's happening at Carnegie Mellon and I think specifically you came out of the Robotics Institute in something called the Traffic21 project. >> Yeah, Traffic21 is funded by some local private interests who believed that the various technologies that are, really, CMU is known for around computer science, robots, engineering, could be instrumental in bringing about this AV revolution. And as a consequence of that, they developed a program early on to try to bring these technologies together. Uber came along and literally hired 27 of those researchers. Argo, now... Argo, Ford's autonomous vehicle now, is big in Pittsburgh as well. On any given day, by my estimate, it's not an official estimate here, there are about 400 autonomous vehicles, Ford and Uber vehicles, on Pittsburgh's streets every single day. It's an eerie experience being driven around by a completely autonomous Uber vehicle, believe me. >> I've been in a couple. It's interesting and we did a thing with a company called Phantom. They're the ones that step if your Uber gets stuck. >> Oh, yeah. >> Which is interesting. (laughs) So really interesting times and exciting and I will go and pay closer attention for the alligator patterns (laughs) on my route home tonight. (laughs) All right, Mark, thanks for stopping by and sharing the insight. >> Thanks again, Jeff. Appreciate you having me. >> All right, he's Mark, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from the Autotech Council Autonomous Vehicles event in Milpitas, California. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)