A Ukrainian team has developed an autonomous drone with computer vision that can fly on its own and search for potholes on the roads. The drone flies on autopilot, streaming video to a laptop, while the program searches for damage on the road and adds them to a database.
A Ukrainian team has developed an autonomous drone with computer vision that can fly on its own and search for potholes on the roads. The drone flies on autopilot, streaming video to a laptop, while the program searches for damage on the road and adds them to a database.
Developer Artem Zaporozhets told dev.ua about this.
The project will be called VisionNode drone. So far, the drone can fly independently along two routes — a straight line and a square. Zaporozhets notes that in the future, the team plans to make it possible for a person to also completely plot a specific route on a map.
The "eyes" of the system are the YOLOv8 model — a computer vision model that can find and recognize objects in photos and videos, and the developers took the dataset for training the model from Roboflow — a platform that contains tools and datasets for computer vision. The drone transmits the video to a computer, where OpenCV and the trained model analyze the image and look for potholes. The developers have already tested it on real roads. According to Artem, it recognizes potholes well, although the model is still going to be improved.
The developer shared a screenshot of the interface. In it, we can see the video from the drone, as well as the hole that the program highlighted with an orange square. And to the right of the video, we can see the targets that have already been detected, their photos, coordinates, and the AI's level of confidence in the correctness of the detection.
For the first version of the project, the team used a small five-inch drone with an additional ESP32-S3 board. However, this drone has a weak battery, so it stays in the air for only 5–8 minutes. According to Zaporozhets, for real work, the team plans to switch to a seven-inch drone, which will be able to fly for about 40 minutes. Artem estimated the first prototype at 15,000 hryvnias.
The developer says the team plans to talk to utilities to see if they need this way to inspect roads. However, Artem also notes that this technology can be used for more than just finding potholes. According to Zaporozhets, such technology could be used for many tasks, including monitoring fires, searching for mines, counting items in warehouses, or even tracking a moving object.
Artem also shared a video where we can see how the drone follows the ball.
Previously, dev.ua reported on how a student from Rivne used similar technology and developed AI for police drones to help them monitor the traffic situation and record accidents.
