PROWL
The Planning and Routing Object Warning Locator service aims to provide the GPS location of all physical hazards and objects in the world.
The system offers access to multiple reference sources of GPS encoded polygons that represent buildings, topographical features, trees, hazards and no-fly zones – to name just a few. These hazard references can be leveraged by planning software to create a safe route for automated vehicles – avoiding vehicle loss and damage, reducing the risk of vehicle collision with structures and objects, and complying with flight exclusions and requests for privacy.
When users upload GPS polygons or point clouds to the system, they are compared to existing objects in the database, and AI is used to identify any improvements that the new data can provide to the objects in the database. This allows the system to improve constantly. AI also identifies likely errors, corruption or deliberate tampering, to ensure the validity and trust in the data.
It’s crowd sourced, extensible, constantly evolving and capable of doing much more. Each object can be tagged with any textual information – this could include data such as the owner of the object data, tree species and the council or company responsible for maintaining it, the construction date and architect / owner of a building, when a power line was last inspected and by which company, the date that a construction site is licensed to have cranes – the list can be endless.
Learn about the approach to the problem here.