•The Zero Accidents AI Challenge is a call for startups from around the world to find innovative and effective solutions to predict, prevent and manage accidents by combining Artificial Intelligence with satellite and vehicle data.
•This call, the second edition of the Abertis Global Challenge, is part of Beyond Roads, Abertis' mobility-changing innovation hub.
•Azisa & Aren won the first 'Drone Challenge' with a project that is already being tested in Abertis' Mexican subsidiary to inspect difficult access points in infrastructures thanks to the combination of drones and AI.
13 November 2024 - Abertis , a world leader in mobility-transformation projects and high-capacity roads, is launching the Zero Accidents AI Challenge, an international call open to startups designed to integrate differential and cutting-edge technologies and so move towards a 'Zero Accidents' vision. The challenge in this second edition focuses on using satellite and vehicle data, combined with artificial intelligence, to transform traffic management and road safety. The challenge mainly seeks to enhance infrastructure monitoring by making great strides in our ability to gather data, identify dangerous situations and anticipate in order to prevent accidents through data analysis and manage them better by mitigating their effects with a data-driven response.
"We seek road safety excellence by implementing cutting-edge technologies that let us go one step closer towards the Zero Accidents vision," says Antonio Durán, Global Head of Innovation at Abertis. "Artificial Intelligence can help us improve predictive models, provide a faster and more effective response, minimising the risks and consequences of accidents, and add new differential solutions that substantially improve current operations on our high-capacity roads, which are already renowned for their safety and efficiency".
Until 24 January, any start-ups from all over the world that are interested in pooling synergies with Abertis and contributing their innovative and effective solutions can submit their applications through beyondroads.abertis.com. A panel of experts formed by members from the different countries in which the Group is present will assess the entries, and the winning entry, which will be announced in May 2025, will be awarded a prize of approximately €40,000 with which to carry out a pilot in one of the countries in which Abertis operates. Each of the three runner-up solutions will receive a prize of €6,000.
The priority: satellite data and vehicle data
Participating startups must prove their data acquisition and processing abilities, which is key to ensuring an effective solution, define what kind of data they need to develop their solution, and how they plan to obtain it. If their entry includes the use of AI/ML algorithms, they must comply with security, sustainability, governance, and monitoring criteria.
Abertis’ challenge seeks to embrace solutions based on new data sources, prioritising those obtained by satellite and through vehicles. If the solutions presented are based on any other source - data from navigation or geolocation applications, mobile devices, motorway cameras, traffic sensors, data on weather conditions, data on interventions on the runway, data on mass events near the motorway such as festivals or concerts, or traffic forecast data – their use must be disruptive.
"This is one of today’s most ambitious infrastructure-innovation projects and it is driving us to pursue such necessary goals as 'zero accident rate' on roads. This is one of the pillars underpinning the activities of the Abertis Foundation, which once again is joining the challenge to promote new ways of guaranteeing more efficient and sustainable road safety", emphasised Georgina Flamme, director of the Abertis Foundation.
Azisa & Aren, winners of the first 'Drone Challenge'.
Around 70 startups from all over the world applied to the first call that Abertis and the Abertis Foundation launched at the end of 2023 and was designed to identify innovative solutions to today's mobility challenges based on using drones to improve road operations and infrastructure maintenance.
The winner of the first 'Drone Challenge' was Azisa & Aren, a project spearheaded by a Spanish company and an American company. Both are currently developing the winning project at Abertis' Mexican subsidiary, RCO, based on infrastructure inspection, developing more efficient and sustainable supervision services thanks to their combined experience in drone technology and artificial intelligence applied to structure management.
