Solutions by typeInfrastructure integrity
Who reports the rockfall before the first car arrives?
The ground moved and the road is still open
It is 05:40 on the access road to the dam. Earth and blocks have come down off the cut slope and cover the right-hand lane up to the centre line; loose stones are still rolling. No vehicle has passed, so nobody knows. The first one up will come in the dark, with the bend ahead and the debris on the exit. The camera on the pole has been recording the fall since the first second.
4 cameras across 4 sectors
This is how you ask for it
«Alert me if material falls onto the access road, even with no vehicle passing, and tell me how much of the road is left clear.»
Here the consequence is not a bill: it is who gets there first. If the maintenance crew gets there, the lane is closed, it is cleared and a morning is lost. If a car gets there, everything changes. The same goes for a sinkhole in the city: until somebody signs it, it is still an open carriageway with a hole in it, with pedestrians walking up to the edge to look and cars stopped on both sides.
You decide once
The organisation decides once which stretches are watched, how much carriageway has to stay clear for it to remain passable, whether the alert closes the road or only calls out the crew, and who gets called at dawn. That is agreed between maintenance and the control room. IRIS then applies it on every slope with a camera, at any hour, and alerts just the same when there is not a vehicle for miles.
A rockfall is almost always discovered one of two ways: because somebody sees it while driving past, or because somebody runs into it. The second one is the bad one. And on mountain roads, dam access roads and quarries, the gap between the material coming down and the first vehicle passing can be twenty minutes or five hours, depending on the hour and the day. Nobody controls that number.
With a sinkhole in a city something similar happens, and faster. The pavement drops, the hole appears, and within two minutes there are cars stopped on either side, a worker leaning over and pedestrians walking to the edge to look. What is urgent there is not only the hole: it is the people approaching an edge that is still collapsing. That is the part almost nobody sees in time.
IRIS watches the slope and the carriageway. It sees that material has come down where there was none, it says how much road is left clear, and it warns if there are people or vehicles near the edge. It sends the camera, the time and the video of the fall, so whoever decides to close the road decides while looking at the scene and not from a confused phone call. IRIS closes nothing: the control room does that.
And there is a question that gets asked afterwards and today almost never has an answer: was this slope like that last month? A slope inspection is a mental snapshot taken by whoever walked past, and between one inspection and the next nothing is written down. With the same camera that reports the fall you can put the image from thirty days ago beside it and see whether the crest has a different profile, whether there are new cracks, or whether the vegetation has moved. It does not replace the inspection: it gives it something to look at before going up.
What changes
Before: the warning came from a driver, with an approximate location and a size exaggerated or played down depending on the fright.
Now: it comes from the camera, with the exact point, the time of the fall and an image you can show to whoever has to decide. The crew sets off knowing what they will find and what to bring, instead of going out to have a look.
Where we have seen it
CAM-31Sinkhole in the roadway
«Alert me as soon as the pavement collapses, and tell me if vehicles or people are near the edge.»
CAM-149Rockfall on the access road
«Tell me if material falls onto the access road, even if no vehicle goes past, and tell me how much of the carriageway is left clear.»
CAM-390The face is coming down with someone underneath
«Tell me if material comes off the face, and whether anyone was underneath at that moment.»
CAM-65Landslide onto the road
«Tell me if material comes down from the slope onto the road, and show me if the slope looks different from the last inspection.»
What it does not do
IRIS does not predict rockfalls. It sees what has already come down, not what is about to: that is what monitoring instruments, inclinometers and slope inspections are for, and they are still needed.
It does not measure volume either, and it does not say whether the ground is still stable. It can show how much road is left clear and compare how that slope looked before, and that is already a lot for deciding fast, but the technical assessment is made by a geotechnical engineer.
Questions
- Can it warn before it falls?
- No. A camera sees what has already happened, not what is going to, and promising otherwise would be selling smoke. What it can do is show how that slope looked in earlier checks and whether its appearance has changed, which helps the inspection. To anticipate movement you have geotechnical instrumentation and periodic surveys, and IRIS neither replaces them nor wants to.
- Does it alert even when no car goes past?
- Yes, and that is precisely the point. Detection does not depend on there being traffic: it depends on the slope or the carriageway having changed. That is why it works at five in the morning on an empty road, which is when you gain the most margin. If there are vehicles or people nearby at that moment, the alert says so too, because a covered lane and a covered lane with people beside it are not the same thing.
- Does it work inside a quarry?
- Yes, and there the alert changes meaning: the first thing you need to know is not how much rock came down, it is whether anyone was underneath. IRIS watches the face and alerts when material breaks away, saying whether there were people or machines at the foot at that moment. It identifies nobody: it says that somebody is there, where, and on which camera, so the supervisor can go straight there instead of counting heads over the radio.
- Can it tell a rockfall from a truck that tipped soil?
- Largely yes, because what it looks at is how the material appears. A tipping has a truck in front of it, a manoeuvre, and a heap growing in a planned spot. A rockfall appears all at once off the slope, spreads out in a fan and leaves dust. Even so, some scenes do look alike, which is why the rule is tuned with real footage from that stretch. One alert too many beats finding out with a car in it.
Demo · IRIS at work
A new case each time. Always the same screen.
It plays by itself and shows one case from start to finish. It is a summary: the real screen has far more functions than fit in this box.
- Cameras on the map
- You draw an area
- What passed shows up
Not seeing yours here?
These words are the ones we have built, not the ones IRIS understands. The list falls short on purpose: you ask for it in a sentence, and sentences do not run out. Tell us what is in front of your cameras and we will tell you whether it understands it, or not yet.
And the best part
What happens outside the framedoes not exist for IRIS. No camera sees the whole world.
So the first thing we do is check what each camera covers and write it down: from here you can understand this, and not that. A dull hour that saves a lot of misunderstandings.
Tell us your problem and we will say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
We reply the same working day.