Clean water, safe roads, accessible broadband and electricity: These things are not a given. They depend on vast infrastructure networks that need to be constantly maintained and improved in order to function. America is failing badly on this front. In its latest report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s aging infrastructure a dismal C-.
According to Mach9, a startup founded in 2021, part of the solution is in furnishing infrastructure providers with better information about the physical world. The company is using AI to convert mobile lidar (light detection and ranging, a type of imaging technology) scans into 2D and 3D engineering models at a fraction of the cost and time than standard processes. This means that utility companies, engineering firms, construction companies, and others can make timely progress on massive infrastructure projects, know where to direct capital for upgrades, or just better understand the assets under their stewardship.
The company’s flagship product, Digital Surveyor, can also automatically identify over 20 features, like utility poles, traffic signals, and road signs. The status quo is that these features are manually identified by human operators. Mach9’s customers include some major infrastructure providers and engineering service companies in the U.S. and Canada, like Michael Baker International, POWER Engineers, Langan, and Fibersmith.
Alexander Baikovitz, Mach9 co-founder and CEO, said he got into this space while at Carnegie Mellon University. As a robotics student researcher, he worked on infrastructure projects like decontaminating legacy nuclear facilities for the U.S. Department of Energy, and he realized that “a lot of the robotics problems that we were solving were actually hardcore survey and mapping problems.” Which is to say, infrastructure projects are often halted from the beginning — even armed with the b …