Britain’s crumbling roads could be fixed by robots capable of filling in a pothole in a minute.

An army of autonomous* road vehicles or drones could one day be prowling around towns and cities identifying cracks in roads and pavements before a pothole develops. In just one minute, a robot with an attached 3-D printer will be able to spray asphalt* into a crack in the road to repair it. And the robots will even work in low-traffic hours, completing their work at night to ensure roads to not have to be closed down during the day.

Leeds City Council is already working with a team of engineers and designers to pioneer the concept of “self-repairing cities.”

Highways England is already exploring more hi-tech approaches to fixing the road network. In its own vision of the future, outlined in report, it predicted that cars of the future could be programmed to spot potholes on motorways and automatically transmit the information to Highways England to schedule repairs.(SD-Agencies)