A three-mile stretch of Interstate 94 in Michigan will be converted into America’s first smart highway.reports that the Alphabet-backed startup Cavnue has started constructing the smart highway as part of a new pilot project that could spur other construction projects across the country.
The pilot program of the highway is located between Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan. There are future plans to extend the smart highway to 40 miles into six more phases that would connect to both cities once the pilot program is complete. The smart highway works with a series of poles placed every 200 meters along the road that hold sensor pods, compute pods and communication equipment. There are also cameras along the highway that monitor every stretch of roadway and take images that are analyzed by AI and machine learning algorithms to identify hazardous driving conditions. Alerts are sent to MDOT and drivers connected to the roadway.
So far, the system can only talk to autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles but Cavnue expects half of cars to have some level of autonomy by 2030., for instance, started working on its first internet-connected road in 2014.