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UK starts early trials of World's first pothole preventing robot (www.youtube.com)

submitted 9 months ago by RoboGroMo to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Driverless vehicle that uses sensors to measure road surface quality and repair small cracks to stop them turning into potholes and hopefully decreasing the cost of road maintenance while improving average surface quality.

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[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Well it might be off, as there are other factors, but I wasn't meaning it as hyperbole - road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and a typical bus weighs about 10 times the weight of a compact, so damage would be roughly 10^4 times larger. This is called the "Generalised Fourth Power Law" and there are tons of links about it:

https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/

(Which btw, you can apply the other way and state that you need an insane amount of bicycles to match the road damage of a single car).

If they took the top end bracket of SUV weights and the bottom end of bus weights, they could have reached vastly different numbers. I used 1800 kg (large sedan or compact SUV) and 18000 kg for a bus (the mercedes Benz citaro starts at roughly 18500 kg), to keep the numbers simple.

[–] BluesF@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That's reasonable - the source I checked didn't use the fourth power, and it was taking into account the number of wheels as well. Anyway, I think the point still stands that just like cars there is a place for busses in a more sensibly designed transit system, despite this one specific disadvantage. Bikes are obviously superior in many ways to other transport but are only really practical over quite short distances (I'm not averse to cycling 10+ miles to get somewhere but I'm gonna need a shower when I arrive lol).