Unit 001 underway · Miami · 2026

Robots that build and run entire cities.

Aedile is building purpose-built robots for every class of physical city work, inside buildings and across construction sites, roads, infrastructure, and public spaces. Each robot shares one spatial world model, task memory, safety, and fleet coordination. One workflow first; eventually, the whole city.

PATCH‑E PATCH-E, the pothole-patching robot, smoothing fresh asphalt into a pothole unit 001 · pothole hunter
Interactive demo

Break the city.
Watch the crew fix it.

This is a concept simulation, not deployed hardware, showing how an Aedile fleet could share a site map and task queue. Click any street to open a pothole, tap a park, or hit Chaos to dispatch the simulated robots.

Click a street to spawn a pothole
City health 100% Potholes filled 0 Litter cleared 0 Lawns mowed 0 Lanes managed 0 Crew‑hrs saved 0
The robots

Not one robot.
A catalog of coworkers.

One autonomy stack, one depot, one chassis DNA, and a growing line of task modules. Browse the crew the way a city buys it: by the job it kills. Drag to spin.

PATCH‑E drag to spin

The engineering sheet: PATCH‑E, first off the line

UNIT 001 lidar + stereo perception hot‑mix hopper · 220 L mill / fill / compact arm rubber tracks · curb + slope rated patch zone · Ø ≤ 60 cm 1.40 m 0.98 m PROTOTYPE CONCEPT · JUL 2026 AEDILE · PATCH‑E POTHOLE PATCHER · REV A · JUL 2026 · 1/1
Targetscan, prepare, fill, compact, and photo-log each repair
Targetremote-supervised operation in controlled private sites
Safetygeofencing, deterministic stops, and human recovery
Measurestereo + lidar estimate defect and finished-surface geometry
Walking paceslow and deliberate. Boring on purpose
Before / afterphoto proof of every patch, pushed to the city

Concept targets for Unit 001. We have not yet deployed an Aedile pothole-repair robot or begun a customer pilot.

The Aedile fleet lined up on a city street: PATCH-E, SWOOP, MO and CONE-Y

The whole crew at the depot, cartoon edition: same faces you'll meet on the street.

Night shift

One night with the fleet

Cities do their best work while everyone's asleep. Here's tonight's shift.

LANE ✕
7:00 PM

CONE‑Y closes the lane. No humans in traffic.

Tonight's resurfacing job needs a lane closed. Today, that means workers stepping into live traffic, part of why 800+ people die in US work zones every year. CONE‑Y rolls out, drops a perfect taper in 90 seconds, and parks itself as a glowing barrier.

pothole #41 ✓
11:30 PM

PATCH‑E hunts. Scans. Fills. Repeat ×40.

Our first target workflow is to scan a defect, prepare it, place repair material, compact it, and record the result. The sequence shown here is a simulation; cycle time, repair quality, and operating constraints still require physical testing.

2:00 AM

SWOOP leaves nothing but sparkle.

Quiet electric sweeping, curb to curb. Autonomous sweepers already work nights in Finland and China. US main streets are still waiting. SWOOP inhales a night's worth of litter before the coffee shops open.

4:30 AM

MO stripes the median like a ballpark.

Medians, embankments, park edges: the mowing that cities outsource for millions, done in tidy overnight stripes. Kansas DOT alone spends ~$12M a year mowing roadsides, and Indiana cuts 40,000 acres of them; MO does it without the joystick.

0 cones at rush hour
6:00 AM

The city wakes up fixed.

Forty-one potholes gone, twelve miles swept, the median striped, the lane reopened before the first commuter. No overtime. No flaggers in traffic. No 311 tickets. Just a city that quietly works.

Why now

The most boring work in America is a gold mine.

Cities can't hire, roads keep breaking, and the robots finally work. Every number below is a reason this company should exist.

$0B

paid by US drivers every year for pothole damage

AAA, 2021 estimate, still its latest
0+

people killed in US road work zones every year, 2020–24, including ~100 road workers

FHWA · NHTSA FARS
$0B

of VC poured into construction robotics in Q1–Q3 2025, up 125% in a year

Zacua Ventures report
0

autonomous pothole-patching robots in commercial service anywhere on Earth. Full map in the Market tab.

Robotiz3d ARRES Ultra · Pave (YC W25) · our research, July 2026
Market math

The chore list is a $67B line item.

That's not our projection; it's the federal ledger. FHWA counts $67B a year of US road maintenance across every level of government. Here's the slice a robot crew can win, and how empty that corner still is.

How big is the pie?

TAM
$0B/yr
US road-maintenance spend

What federal, state and local government together spend keeping existing roads usable: the pool the whole fleet draws from.

SAM
$24–39B/yr
The four jobs our robots do

Patching & pothole repair (~$12–27B) · work-zone traffic control (~$7.7B) · roadside mowing (~$2.4B) · street sweeping (~$2.0B). Our bottom-up model: the honest range, not the biggest number we could print.

SOM
~$0M ARR
First ~100 robots in the field

Robots-as-a-service at ~$300K/robot-year, about what one human crew and a closed lane cost a contractor today.

Bands nest; they're not drawn to scale. Sources: FHWA Highway Statistics 2023 · IBISWorld · Growth Market Reports · Technavio

Who's already out there?

the open lane one task → the whole crew human-driven → fully autonomous Patch & seal trucks One-person patching and crack-sealing trucks (Cimline DuraPatcher, SealMaster CrackPro). Labor-saving, but a human drives every one. Amarillo, TX and Akron, OH bought them at ~$300K apiece. Kratos ATMA Kratos + Royal Truck autonomous truck-mounted attenuator: a driverless crash truck that follows the work convoy. ~15 deployed across state DOTs: proof DOTs buy autonomous work-zone machines. Trombia Trombia Free: autonomous electric street sweeper, deployed in Finland. US main streets remain untouched. Scythe → ASI Scythe Robotics: autonomous commercial mowers, acquired by Autonomous Solutions Inc. in March 2026, a real exit in the category. Pave (YC W25) Pave Robotics (San Francisco, YC Winter 2025): Tracer, a fully autonomous crack-sealing robot. Seals cracks so potholes form slower; it doesn't fix the ones already there. Robotiz3d (UK) Robotiz3d (UK): ARRES line. Its crack-sealing unit is trialing with UK councils; ARRES Ultra, the one that actually repairs potholes, is still in development. Lightly funded (seed-stage). Municipal Robotics Municipal Robotics (Cleveland): $18K open-source sidewalk rover with swappable tools: "swap the tool, not the fleet." Multi-task ambition, sidewalk-scale hardware, pilots starting summer 2026. Aedile long-term fleet vision Aedile: one shared deployment and autonomy layer, many specialized robots; pothole repair first.

The field is fragmented. Pave (YC W25) builds crack-sealing robots, Robotiz3d is developing pothole-repair systems, and established manufacturers sell operator-driven patch trucks. Aedile starts with pothole repair and aims to reuse its site data and deployment layer across additional physical jobs.

Do buyers actually pay?

$86.3B: what 24 states are short on road & bridge upkeep this decade. They can't outspend the backlog; they need cheaper repairs.Pew Charitable Trusts, 2025
146 potholes in one day: Amarillo's record with three one-person patch trucks, vs ~20 before. Akron bought two at $300K each. Cities already pay six figures to shrink a crew.Amarillo & Akron, 2025
12 state DOTs fund a pooled research program on autonomous road maintenance: patching, sealing, mowing, plowing, crash trucks. The buyers are studying exactly this.Purdue / INDOT pooled fund, 2025–26
The plan

Wedge first. Fleet second. City OS third.

Nobody buys "everything" on day one, so we sell one painfully obvious ROI, then expand inside the same customer.

1

Own the pothole

Start on controlled private parking lots, campuses, and industrial yards. Sell completed repairs to property operators or through paving contractors, then earn the right to operate on public roads.

first milestone · one physical repair test
2

Land the fleet

Every night on patrol, PATCH‑E maps litter, cracks, faded lines and overgrowth. That data sells robot #2, #3 and #4 to the same customer; CONE‑Y, SWOOP and MO share the chassis, sensors and autonomy stack.

2027–28 · same buyer, more robots
3

Public Works OS

Dispatch, routing, before/after proof, 311 integration: the software layer that runs mixed human-robot crews. The robots are the wedge; the operating system for city maintenance is the moat.

2028+ · recurring city revenue

The city of the future
fixes itself overnight.

We're putting PATCH‑E on real asphalt. If you operate commercial pavement, run paving crews, or manage public works, we'd love to learn your workflow.