Raleigh Turns Drones and GeoAI into a Living Digital Twin of the City
Raleigh is building a digital representation of the city that is designed to change whenever the city itself does. Drone surveys of construction sites, infrastructure, storm damage and public spaces can be processed into new imagery and three-dimensional models, fed back into the city’s geographic information system and incorporated into an increasingly detailed digital twin.
Cities have been creating 3D visualisations and GIS datasets for years, but their usefulness deteriorates when the physical environment moves faster than the information describing it. Roads are resurfaced, buildings appear, utilities are moved, construction sites advance and storms can alter parts of the landscape in hours.
Raleigh’s approach brings reality capture much closer to everyday municipal operations. Drones provide repeatable observations of the physical city, GIS supplies the authoritative spatial framework, and Esri’s mapping and processing technology turns those observations into information that can be compared, shared and increasingly analysed using geospatial artificial intelligence. The result is beginning to look less like a conventional city model and more like a continuously maintained record of the built environment…