Road & Runway Intelligence

The operating system for road & runway infrastructure.

Atlas OS turns raw LiDAR, video and GPS into a funded, prioritised maintenance programme — detecting, measuring and costing every defect across highways and airfields. In hours, not months.

Book a demo See how it works

mm.

LiDAR precision

5,100+

Assets managed

25-stage

AI pipeline

60–80%

Below SCANNER cost

Atlas OS · Network Map 51.5377°N · 0.0492°E · z14

Atlas OS network condition map showing colour-coded road condition over a surveyed area

Good Fair Poor

The problem

Roads and runways are deteriorating faster than we can measure them.

The surveying status quo — manual inspections, SCANNER surveys every 2–4 years, and decades-old asset databases — was built for an era before AI, LiDAR and cloud. The result is reactive maintenance that costs 5–10× more than prevention.

£14B+

UK highway maintenance backlog, growing every year

700k+

Pothole complaints reported to councils annually

£30M+

Annual negligence claims under the Highways Act 1980

£30–50/km

Traditional SCANNER survey cost, commissioned every 2–4 years

The Atlas pipeline

From raw sensor data to a funded programme — automatically.

One vertically integrated platform replaces a fragmented toolchain. A single survey drive captures everything; the 25-stage pipeline handles the rest.

CAPTURE01

Capture

Vehicle-mounted sensors collect LiDAR point clouds, high-resolution video and GPS/IMU telemetry simultaneously. One drive captures everything needed for comprehensive condition assessment — highway or airfield.

LiDAR4K VideoGPS / IMU

DETECT02

Detect

A YOLO-trained neural network identifies every defect — potholes, cracking, surface failures, vegetation encroachment. A vision-language model provides secondary, multi-criteria condition scoring at scale.

YOLO DetectionLLM ScoringDBSCAN Clustering

MEASURE03

Measure

Calibrated 3D LiDAR delivers millimetre-precision measurement of every defect — width, depth, length and area. Surface-fitting algorithms extract clean metrics from noisy point clouds. No manual measurement, no estimation.

mm PrecisionSurface FittingPlane Calibration

COST04

Cost

Each defect is classified by severity tier and assigned a repair cost from configurable cost-per-m² models. Road and runway segments accumulate total repair liability — the entire network gets a price tag.

Severity TiersCost / m²Network Liability

SCHEDULE05

Schedule

Defects are clustered into work packages, prioritised by condition risk, and scheduled against fiscal-year budgets. Contractors receive one-click GeoJSON / Shapefile exports for field crews.

Work PackagesBudget PlanningGeoJSON Export

One platform, two networks

Built for highways and airfields alike.

The same automated pipeline serves the organisations that keep surfaces safe — whether that surface is a carriageway or a runway.

For councils & contractors

Evidence-based highway asset management.

Survey a network at a fraction of SCANNER cost and turn the data into a defensible, risk-based maintenance programme — exactly what the Well-managed Highway Infrastructure Code of Practice demands.

Network-wide condition scoring on every carriageway and footway
Per-defect costing and budget-aligned work packages
Auditable evidence trail to reduce Highways Act liability

Network Condition carriageway · footway

Highway network condition map with colour-coded road segments

Defect Triage

For airport operators

Airside pavement intelligence.

Runways, taxiways and aprons carry zero tolerance for surface failure. Atlas detects and measures airside pavement defects to millimetre precision, so engineering teams can plan interventions around operations — and manage FOD risk before it grounds an aircraft.

Runway, taxiway and apron condition in one cartographic view
Millimetre depth measurement for FOD and spalling risk
Repeat surveys to track deterioration between maintenance windows

Airside Pavement runway · taxiway · apron

Airport airside pavement condition map with focus-area boundary

Defect Location

Aerial view of an apron defect located to within millimetres

Inside the platform

One platform, from survey to schedule.

Multi-tenant SaaS with interactive maps, defect inspection, automated costing and budget planning — the full workflow, from capture to funded work package.

Defect triage board with status counts and a measurement table

Detect & Triage

Every defect, measured and ranked

Open, fixed and unreviewed defects with millimetre measurements, severity and location — across the whole network, automatically populated from each survey.

Instrument-cluster readout of defect area, depth, width, length, category and cost

Measure & Cost

Millimetre metrics, instant cost

Area, max depth, width, length, category and estimated repair cost — extracted from calibrated 3D LiDAR for every defect.

Budget plan with condition-coverage breakdown and funded sections

Plan & Fund

Budgets aligned to condition

Allocate a fiscal-year budget across the network, ranked by condition risk, and see exactly what each pound funds before crews mobilise.

Why Atlas

Survey companies collect data. Asset platforms manage it. Atlas does both.

The market is split between survey specialists who don't manage assets and asset platforms that don't detect defects. Atlas OS is the only system that closes the loop — detection through to funded schedule.

	Atlas OS	Vaisala / SCANNER	Gaist	Yotta	Confirm
AI defect detection	YOLO + LLM	Rules-based	Camera AI	Manual	Manual
3D LiDAR measurement	mm precision	Yes	No LiDAR	No	No
Automated costing	Per defect	No	No	Manual entry	Template
Budget planning	Fiscal year	No	No	Yes	Basic
Work scheduling & export	Packages + export	No	No	Yes	Yes

Engineering depth

Deep geospatial engineering at the core.

Sensor calibration

Per-pixel LiDAR calibration via plane-fitting and Bayesian optimisation, correcting systematic sensor error before measurement.

Coordinate transforms

A full quaternion transform chain from raw sensor polar coordinates through vehicle frame to world ENU, fused with IMU/GPS.

Multi-modal fusion

LiDAR 3D, video imagery and GPS/IMU dynamics fused for high-confidence defect identification and measurement.

Native-speed processing

Performance-critical tile rasterisation compiled to native code with Cython for production throughput at network scale.

Multi-tenant SaaS

PostgreSQL row-level security with account-scoped data isolation — each authority and operator sees only its own network.

25+ orchestrated tasks

A file-based ETL pipeline with dependency resolution, logging and error recovery, processing real survey data daily.

In operation

Operating across live networks today.

Live across local government, infrastructure contractors and transport operators — processing real survey data through the full workflow today.

5,100+

Road & runway assets under active management

3 sectors

Live across local government, contractors & airport operators

7,200+

Defects detected, measured and costed automatically

Measurement precision validated against ground truth

Get started

See Atlas OS on your network.

Book a demo and we'll walk you through a live survey — from raw LiDAR to a funded, prioritised maintenance programme for your highways or airfield.

A walkthrough tailored to your network and surfaces
Survey planning and pilot-area scoping
Procurement-ready: framework & portal friendly