WCX 2026: Honda’s Crowdsourced PRMS Can Improve Roads, Drivers

April 1, 2026

Sebastian Blanco

Honda outfitted two CR-Vs with lidar for shoulder drop detection and an advanced vision sensor for pothole, guardrail damage, and sign deficiency detection. (*Honda*)

The Ohio Department of Transportation is responsible for nearly 49,000 lane miles of roadway, and one way ODOT knows which ones need attention is to send actual employees out to take actual notes. A recent project, conducted with Honda, should be able to drastically reduce this type of driving busywork, giving ODOT more time and money to actually fix things instead of spending time searching for the things that need fixing.

Honda worked with DriveOhio, ODOT’s smart mobility hub, to further develop the automaker’s Proactive Roadway Maintenance System (PRMS). Honda has been testing PRMS since 2021 and completed the two-year project in Ohio this January. Technology partners for the project included i-Probe Inc., Parsons, and the University of Cincinnati.

Still in prototype form, PRMS uses vehicles equipped with advanced vision and lidar sensors to attempt to identify places or equipment that need repair or some other sort of attention. This could include potholes, damaged road signs or barriers, inadequate shoulder drops, poor road markings, and overall rough roads. The test area covered around 3,000 miles of roads in central and southeastern Ohio around three of ODOT’s regional offices, where the two Honda vehicles that participated in the project (one operated by ODOT to collect data, the other by Honda for debugging) were sent out in all types of weather and at different times of day over six weeks, on a three-week rotation.

Honda chief engineer **Sue Bai**, will present some of the findings from the PRMS test at SAE’s WCX 2026 World Congress Experience, taking place in Detroit in April. DriveOhio’s managing director of infrastructure, Nick Hegemier, will also be a part of Bai’s WCX discussion. Bai told SAE Media that the real winners here are people like Hegemier, who will be able to restructure their work lives with something like PRMS. [**Go to the WCX 2026 page** for registration and programming info.]

“I was talking to one person in ODOT, I looked at him and said, ‘Man, what a waste,’” she said. “You are by far one of the top experts on maintenance, and if we can make your life easier to make this detection automated, then you can fully focus your energy on planning and fixing. That is why ODOT wants the system so much.”

Does PRMS preview future Honda vehicles?

The DriveOhio PRMS vehicles have a retrofit camera and a lidar installed, components that Bai said Honda may include in its next-generation ADAS design to automate the required data collection from as many vehicles as possible.

“We hope in the future, [the data] would be coming directly from internal vehicle structures,” Bai said. “Then there’s data coming from the vehicle, such as lane keep assist, lane visibility for the left lane or right lane, and regular stuff like timestamp and location. These get processed in the vehicle to extract whether there’s a pothole, whether there’s a bent guardrail, or how deep the shoulder drop is. The metadata is processed along with the associated images and other data and gets sent to the cloud regularly as the car is driving. At the end of the drive, the ODOT team can go back to their office and sit in front of the laptop to log on to the Honda dashboard, or we also have another version of dashboard created by Parsons that is capable of generating work orders based on the potholes and guardrails to tell ODOT that, yes, these are the deficiencies we see today and this is how you can order materials to fix it.”

AI, customers play a role

The on-board processing uses Edge AI models, and Parson’s dashboard uses the company’s iNET Asset Guardian system. The work orders Bai mentioned can be grouped by severity and proximity and are streamlined by Asset Guardian to benefit ODOT’s field maintenance teams. i-Probe’s contribution included providing data validation and analysis to determine road roughness and lane-marking conditions. The University of Cincinnati helped with sensor integration and led development of the system’s damage-detection features.

Honda says the verified results are impressive. Over the 3,000 miles of roads tested, PRMS was able to detect 99% of damaged or obstructed signs, 93% of damaged guardrails and 89% of potholes. ODOT was able to feed information back to the Edge AI models to identify misdetections, which improved the system over time, the automaker said. Even so, Honda said an automated road condition detection like PRMS could save ODOT over $4.5 million a year, both by taking less time to process and by focusing repair efforts on the areas that actually need them.

Should Honda integrate PRMS into its consumer models, those vehicles could regularly update a DOT’s database with anonymized information. Bai said Honda originally thought this project would mostly benefit Honda drivers, similar to how the new Mercedes S-Class can share pothole location data with other S-Class vehicles for them to prepare their adaptive suspensions, but learned during the project that the benefits would extend not only to other drivers but also to workers tasked with the repair work.

As the Honda test vehicles detected the condition of critical roadway surfaces, pavement markings, and roadside assets, ODOT operators were able to review the deficiencies in real time through web dashboards developed by Honda and Parsons. (*Honda*)

“We had in mind to protect our customers by making the road smoother, have less deficiency so that our ADAS system can perform better and the customer will have a smoother ride with a smoother road surface,” she said. “But as we get into the project, we realized that from the ODOT's or any road operator’s perspective, they also want a safer operation for their road maintenance crew. I learned that at the end of the product, I wish I’d learned that earlier.

“At the end of the product, one of their maintenance leads asked me to hop into their cars and said, Sue, I’m going to give you a field trip to show you why I love your system so much. I figure, ‘Yeah, I know how great our system is. What’s new to see?’ [laughs]. Well, ten minutes into the drive, he stopped in the middle of a two-lane road in a rural area with no shoulder, and he says, ‘Sue, imagine I gave you a yellow jacket ask you to go down to the ditch to check that pole that’s bent.’ I looked at it and said, ‘I don’t want to get out. What if someone comes behind and hits us?’ They said, ‘That is why we love your system so much. It helps protect our workers.’ That’s the moment I realized the safety benefit not just to the drivers but also their construction workers, their road inspectors, and that for me is a value that we ought to broadcast, because through the system we actually get the drivers to protect the road operators through contributing their data to build better roads. That expanded the meaning of this project so much.”

On-road dissertation

In addition to working with DriveOhio, Bai was elected to Director at Large at SAE International for the 2026-2027 term in January. She previously worked at Nissan and has a long history working on V2X technical standards and industry-government collaboration. With all of that technical knowledge, it’s perhaps a bit surprising that her academic research focuses more on the interpersonal ways drivers communicate and how that impacts everyone on the road.

For her dissertation, Bai studied how people react to the road environment, especially if they get to influence it. Her hypothesis was that people will change their driving behavior to be more mindful – the way they drive in their own neighborhoods – if they have some level of control and ownership over how the road is maintained.

The prototype Honda Proactive Roadway Maintenance System can identify pothole development, including size and location. (*Honda*)

“That’s what I see is the impact of [the PRMS] project,” she said. “It’s not just fixing the road, but also helping people to behave more responsibly because they are taking ownership. It’s kind of what I call the anti-middle-finger button.”

Bai arrives at this conclusion based on her study of driver-to-driver communication. So many people told her they wanted a way to show their anger towards other drivers, she wondered about the reverse, something that would say “thank you” or “oops” to diffuse tensions. She ran an experiment with a car driving at an annoyingly low speed and found that almost all other drivers tailgated that car. As soon as they put up a “Sorry, I’m driving on a spare tire” sign, almost everyone backed off.

“That’s almost universal behavior that shows people care, and once they know the reason, they will behave more responsibly,” she said. “Extend that to the road operation, if people get to say, ‘I’m fixing that pothole,’ and ‘I’m fixing that guardrail,’ ‘I’m saving the life of the construction crew,’ they will see the construction crew differently. Instead of just some guy wearing the yellow jacket, they will see them as their own neighborhood workers that they have some connection with, and then they will behave more responsibly. I know this may sound very altruistic, but trust me, I’ve done the research. I know most people have this built into our genes. It’s part of the natural human behavior. We just need to uncover that, enable that.”