Media coverage ·
USF News, FOX 13, and ABC7 Suncoast cover the lab's AI dashcam for post-hurricane road assessment
Three Florida outlets reported on the lab's AI dashcam prototype, which automatically flags potholes, flooding, downed trees, and damaged signs so agencies can assess storm-damaged roads in hours instead of days — most recently ABC7 Suncoast, on the Sarasota County deployment.
The lab’s AI dashcam prototype for post-hurricane roadway damage assessment was covered three times in August 2026 — first by USF News, then by FOX 13 Tampa Bay, which visited the lab for an on-camera interview, and then by ABC7 Suncoast (WWSB), reporting from Sarasota County, where the system is being put to work with the county’s transportation department.
What the work is
The prototype rides along in an ordinary vehicle and automatically identifies potholes, flooding, fallen trees, and damaged signage as the vehicle drives, turning a windshield camera into a continuously working inspection tool that writes its own reports and builds a searchable visual record — no manual data entry. In testing it has cut a roadway damage sweep that would take an inspection crew roughly three days down to six to eight hours, and it runs on any vehicle from model year 2015 or newer, so an agency can deploy it across an existing fleet rather than buying specialized equipment.
The dashcam is one of three AI tools the lab is developing with Florida transportation agencies for storm recovery. The other two are a routing and scheduling optimizer that sequences traffic signal restoration and roadway inspections, and a social media analysis system that surfaces and prioritizes citizen reports of flooded streets and blocked routes.
Why we built it
The work grew directly out of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Talking with the Florida Department of Transportation and Sarasota County afterward made one constraint plain: the bottleneck in recovery is rarely knowing what to fix, it is having enough people to go look. Every hour spent driving roads to find damage is an hour before crews can be dispatched to repair it, and the assessment work itself puts staff on roads that are still hazardous.
That is the case Hao Zhou made to ABC7: “Ideally we want to map the road damage maybe within hours … quickly send limited resources.” Paula Wiggins, Sarasota County’s interim transportation manager, told the station she sees the approach travelling beyond one county — “This will be groundbreaking technology … maybe this will be something we could see in other communities.”
Field testing continues through the fall — including, deliberately, during heavy rainfall — before we bring the system to state and county transportation agencies. The software will be released open source so other Florida counties can run it on their own municipal fleets.
Read more on the project page.