ABB Robots and the Rise of Robotic Pothole Repair

In 1936, WPA crews worked on Lebeau Road in Arabi, Louisiana, with shovels and wheelbarrows. Road repair stayed much the same for decades. Trucks got bigger and asphalt got better, but patching was still done by people standing in the road.

WPA workers with wheelbarrows on Lebeau Road in Arabi, Louisiana, 1936. Photo: WPA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A typical pothole fix today looks like this Oregon crew's: a truck pours hot mix and workers rake and tamp it by hand. Traditional cold-patch repair can take a three-person crew that has to control traffic, get out of the truck, fill the hole and tamp it.

An Oregon DOT crew fills a pothole with hot mix poured from a truck. Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

In late August, Pittsburgh startup Silly Surfacing publicly demonstrated a prototype built with University of Pittsburgh engineers, and it scanned, analysed and filled a real pothole. A depth camera builds a 3D image of the hole, software works out how much material is needed, and a robotic gantry puts it in place.

A deep pothole on Virginia Avenue. Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The company wants one worker in one truck to oversee a system that senses, cleans, fills and tamps a pothole, possibly in under a minute. ABB robots already lay material along computed paths. RobotStudio's 3D Printing PowerPac turns a 3D model into robot paths, and a scanned pothole is also a 3D model.

An engineer runs a robot 3D print planned in ABB RobotStudio. Photo: ABB

An ABB IRB 6700 printed the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum layer by layer. At ETH Zurich, an ABB IRB 4600 on a tracked base, the In situ Fabricator, has built walls directly on site. A truck-mounted ABB arm with a depth camera looks like a plausible next step for road crews.

An ABB IRB 6700 printing the walls of the German Red Cross headquarters in Warendorf-Beckum. Photo: ABB

I expect councils to send robot patch trucks out at night, when roads are quiet, and to keep people for inspection and bigger resurfacing jobs. For homeowners, the same scan-and-fill idea could one day patch driveway cracks, though I'd settle for fewer potholes on my street first.

ETH Zurich's In situ Fabricator, an ABB IRB 4600 on a tracked base, building a curved wall. Photo: Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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