The New York City Subway Is Using Google Pixels To Listen for Track Defects

New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Google have successfully tested technology that uses smartphone sensors to detect subway track defects, the MTA said Thursday. The four-month experiment, dubbed TrackInspect, mounted six Google Pixel phones on four A train subway cars traversing Manhattan and Queens. The phones' accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes and external microphones collected 335 million sensor readings and 1,200 hours of audio data, which were processed through 200 prediction models.

The system identified 92% of defects later confirmed by human inspectors, including broken rails and loose bolts. "The goal with this [project] is to find issues before they become a major issue in terms of service," said Demetrius Crichlow, the agency's president. Following the successful trial, the MTA plans to expand to a full pilot where Google will build a production version for track inspectors.

Roads too?

[AmiMoJo]

I wonder if the same tech could be used for roads. Maybe it could be even simpler, just use the accelerometer to record big jolts, and if you see a large number of vehicles getting them in the same place you know there is probably a pothole there.

Even better would be predicting failures before they happen, but just finding potholes would be a very useful start.

Re:

[alvinrod]

Yes, this has been done for a while now. One of my friends did this at a previous job over a decade ago around the time smartphones started including these kinds of sensors. I forget the specifics, but they were using the data to check road quality based on some metrics they had, but wasn't specifically looking for potholes. I'll have to ask him about it the next time I see him because I remember thinking it was a really interesting idea when I first heard about it.

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[thegarbz]

Not much of a point. This isn't something crowd sourced. This is something they are doing themselves. On a road you can... see the problems. There's no issue with inspection. On a subway on the other hand you need to shut down the line. Also many jolts may be the result of movements which are virtually invisible due to the rigid nature of the interface between the track and the trolly. Cars don't experience it the same way, usually only vertical (again which you can easily see).

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[AmiMoJo]

Sure, but for example Google crowd sources traffic information by aggregating data from many phones travelling on the same road. If they are all going very slowly it indicates heavy traffic.

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[thegarbz]

Oh yeah definitely if you're going a crowd sourced model then this would be the way to do it. However the problem with road maintenance is not that they don't know what needs to be maintained, it's that they don't have the budget / manpower / will to actually do anything about it. An app won't change that.

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[Local ID10T]

Using whose phones? Mounted to whose cars?

In this case, the City of New York owns the trains and the devices (phones) mounted to them. It is not a crowd-sourced "turn your personal device into a spy machine" thing.

Someone realized that all the hardware needed to perform these surveys was already available in an off-the-shelf, cheap, common device. Then they wrote some code to collect the data, mounted up the devices, compiled and verified the results.

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[evil_aaronm]

Funny you mention this. I drive across NY frequently, and wanted something to record the nasty-ass bumps on Rt 86. Mine's based on a slightly broken FRDM-K66F, and does pretty much what you said: it logs to SD card the GPS location of serious bumps, and also alerts me to objects behind me when I'm backing up my delivery van and can't see the loading dock because of product already in the back. However, this is #3 on my stack of projects - after a vibration recording device, and Sky Net.

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[mjwx]

I wonder if the same tech could be used for roads. Maybe it could be even simpler, just use the accelerometer to record big jolts, and if you see a large number of vehicles getting them in the same place you know there is probably a pothole there.

Even better would be predicting failures before they happen, but just finding potholes would be a very useful start.

They probably used to have expensive, bespoke equipment for this kind of thing, it's just been replaced with something cheaper, off the shelf that can be modified to do a similar job.

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[AmiMoJo]

That's what happened in Japan with the shinkansen (bullet trains). They just retired Dr. Yellow, the special train they had for checking the tracks. Now the normal trains have equivalent equipment on them.

Cheaper is better (for wide deployment)

[CommunityMember]

The class 1 railroads have been using accelerometers (and other tech) for close to a decade to detect rail (and railcar) anomalies. Exploiting cheaper cell phone technology appears to be the primary advance here. Perhaps it will result in additional deployments across multiple lines to protect life and property.

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[ls671]

Exactly this! My comment would have been a copy paste. Kudos for using cheap off the shelf hardware instead of spending hundreds of millions on some dedicated hardware sensors!

Mass Market

[JBMcB]

There's a similar situation with XBox controllers. The navy was looking for a robust solution to control it's new electrically driven periscopes for submarines. They landed on the XBox controller, because it has the exact controls they need, they are robust, easy to repair and cheap to maintain or replace. Also, incoming sailors are already familiar with them. This came up with that submarine that imploded as a design defect, as they were also using an XBox controller. There are a lot of reasons to critici

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[thegarbz]

They landed on the XBox controller, because it has the exact controls they need.

Yes I can see it now:
"Chinese ship targeted heading 270, Fire again, don't miss this time! No, fire to 268, 266, 264, 262, dammit ensign stop moving the scope!"
"Sir! I'm not touching the controller Sir! It's moving by itself slowly counter clockwise Sir!
"Mother****ing Microsoft and their cheap arse potentiometers!"

Meanwhile on the other side, translated from Mandarin:
"Admiral the Americans are constantly missing, aiming to the South."
"Yes ensign, capitalist pigs have yet to discover wonderful hall effect se

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[drinkypoo]

No need for multi-million dollars contracts just to provide custom made controllers.

How is that relevant here? You don't seem to have any idea how cheap it is to have electronic devices made now.

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[drinkypoo]

There are a lot of reasons to criticize the design of that sub, but using an XBox controller isn't one of them.

False.

I wrote a longer post [pastebin.com] but for some reason it tripped the lame filter, so you can read it on pastebin if you care.

I don't know why these B!zX clowns keep destroying usability of this site, but it's pretty pathetic.

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[tlhIngan]

There's a similar situation with XBox controllers. The navy was looking for a robust solution to control it's new electrically driven periscopes for submarines. They landed on the XBox controller, because it has the exact controls they need, they are robust, easy to repair and cheap to maintain or replace. Also, incoming sailors are already familiar with them. This came up with that submarine that imploded as a design defect, as they were also using an XBox controller. There are a lot of reasons to criticiz

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[bill_mcgonigle]

At least in Boston there's an app you can use to buy fares and they give you a small discount.

Since all phones have amazing accelerometers now I wonder how effective it would be to have an opt-in sensor library in the fare app and gather millions of data points.

They could offer an additional discount tier too, for consideration.

Range to wifi or bluetooth beacons should be sufficient to get a good-enough average.