Google's DeepMind and UK Power Networks want to transform the global utility industry with the creation of digital maps of electricity cables.
Until now, no artificial intelligence (AI) software has been able to recognise hand-drawn straight lines and recreate them as fully interactive digital files. Google’s DeepMind promises to change that. The company's engineers have partnered with UK Power Networks, which delivers electricity across London, to use new image-recognition software to scan thousands of maps – some of which date back decades – and automatically remaster them into a digital format.
The team aims to create digital versions of maps covering more than 180,000km of electricity cables.
Currently, utility firms have to manually scan maps of underground equipment in order to obtain electronic versions, which means they have have extensive libraries of outdated maps. The Google-UK Power Networks partnership is said to be able to finish...