- Burleson deployed robots to scan his sidewalks
- They detect damage, obstructions and other problems that can make it more difficult for people with disabilities to use the sidewalk
- They can cover 6 miles in the time a human could scan 2 miles
Obstacles in your path and damaged sidewalks are frustrations for most pedestrians, but for people with accessibility needs, they can make routes completely inaccessible — so one city is using robots to make their streets better.
Burleson, a city in the US state of Texas, is the first in the state to implement Daxbots – also known as ADA compliance or urban service robots. These Wall-E-look machines roam sidewalks and are packed with scanners and sensors to measure the sidewalk’s width and slope, as well as detect potential obstacles that could pose barriers to people with disabilities (via CBS).
The bots cover about six or seven miles a day—a human would typically cover only two miles in that time—allowing the city to quickly collect a large amount of data. Using this information, officials will know where repairs and improvements are most needed so they can make their city’s streets as accessible as possible — and simply better for all local residents.
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The robot revolution is back!
Forget delivery bots trundling around town with a burger in the boot, the kind of helpful assistants are the kind I’d love to see roaming my local streets. Not just sidewalks, I’d love to see them walk along the roads looking for potholes – near me they’re like hydra heads, one gets filled in and three more take its place.
They are also just cute. In addition to the similarities to Wall-E, I love how the bots seem to pause briefly when people approach so they can take a selfie with them.
What also helps the appeal is that bots offer genuine help to the entire community. Local infrastructure is boring but essential to our everyday lives, yet it can be impossible to know where to best use resources with cumbersome data collection that can take ages – and that local authorities may not have time for.
These Daxbots tackle the problem head-on, and appear to provide a solid template for how other service bots could help make our daily lives better—rather than just chasing flashy, attention-grabbing improvements that aren’t all that useful in the grand scheme of things.
We’ll have to see if the Daxbot program has been a success once the full analysis is complete, but for a change I actually hope we see more robots on the streets.
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