Shellharbour Council's AI Road-Defect Cameras — Automated Pothole and Hazard Detection Across a 500km Road Network

In October 2025, Shellharbour City Council (New South Wales, Australia) began operating a specialised AI camera mounted to the front of council vehicles to automatically scan roads and pathways as vehicles carry out their normal duties across the Shellharbour Local Government Area.

The council's aim is to triage hazards faster and plan maintenance work better by logging defects automatically, rather than relying solely on resident-reported complaints.

The system identifies a wide range of defects - potholes, cracks, uneven surfaces, litter, overhanging vegetation, faded line-marking, damaged signage, graffiti and roadkill - and logs each with photographic evidence and a GPS location into a defect database, with every defect rated on a severity scale so maintenance crews can prioritise the most urgent repairs. Council plans to add a second camera before the end of 2025 to help survey its full 500-kilometre road network and 300 kilometres of pathways more quickly.

Mayor Chris Homer described the system as showing 'great promise for increasing community safety and efficiency,' with the council citing faster hazard triage and better forward planning of maintenance work as the main expected benefits.

As a newly launched pilot, the council has not yet published before/after figures on repair-response times, backlog reduction or cost savings, and no detection-accuracy statistics (unlike some peer deployments) have been made public - this is an early-stage rollout to watch rather than a proven, evaluated outcome.