Working with INDOT (Indiana Department of Transportation), Skylark Labs deploys AI-equipped towers along highway corridors that monitor traffic flow, detect incidents, and assess road conditions in real time -- adapting automatically to weather and lighting changes.
State transportation departments manage thousands of lane-miles with limited visibility into real-time conditions. Traditional traffic monitoring relies on inductive loops and sporadic camera checks, leaving most highway segments unmonitored and incidents undetected for critical minutes. Crashes and stalled vehicles go unreported during which secondary collisions can occur.
Snow, fog, and rain degrade conventional camera systems exactly when monitoring is most critical for driver safety. Road surface deterioration and guardrail damage often go unnoticed until they create hazards. Traffic management centers cannot watch all camera feeds simultaneously, leaving coverage gaps across the network that compromise both safety and operational efficiency.
"Highways are the circulatory system of the economy. AI towers give transportation agencies the ability to see and respond to conditions across their entire network, not just the segments with staff watching screens."
Skylark Labs' AI towers combine multi-sensor hardware with onboard processing to deliver continuous highway intelligence. Each tower operates autonomously, adapting its detection algorithms to current weather and lighting conditions without manual intervention through the Kepler platform.
Automated incident detection identifies collisions, stopped vehicles, and wrong-way drivers within seconds, triggering immediate alerts to dispatch. Weather-adaptive vision adjusts for rain, snow, fog, and glare. Traffic flow analytics measure speed, volume, and density by lane in real time. Infrastructure assessment monitors road surface conditions and roadside assets, flagging deterioration before it becomes a safety hazard. All data flows through Living Intelligence dashboards for real-time situational awareness.
The Synapse AI Box embedded in each tower processes video locally, sending only actionable alerts and aggregated data to the traffic management center -- reducing bandwidth requirements while maintaining sub-second detection latency.
Automated incident detection cuts notification time from minutes to seconds, reducing secondary crash risk. Consistent monitoring performance operates in conditions that would blind conventional cameras or overwhelm human operators. Continuous infrastructure monitoring enables repair scheduling before failures occur, extending asset lifespan.
Granular traffic data supports long-term capacity planning and construction project prioritization across the transportation network. The Kepler analytics platform transforms raw sensor data into actionable intelligence that helps INDOT make evidence-based decisions about infrastructure investment and traffic management strategies.
The INDOT partnership proves that AI-powered highway towers can deliver continuous, weather-resilient monitoring that transportation agencies need. Skylark Labs' approach turns every equipped corridor into an intelligently monitored asset that reports conditions, detects incidents, and supports infrastructure planning without requiring constant human attention.
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