"Grasp road surface conditions while having fun." Aisin Road Maintenance and Management Support Service to Collaborate with PAC-MAN

Mar. 18, 2021

News Release

Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd. and Aisin AW Co., Ltd. (Head Office: Anjo, Aichi; President: Kazuhisa Ozaki)* will collaborate with PAC-MAN, internationally recognized intellectual property (IP) owned by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President & CEO: Yasuo Miyakawa) in the Road Maintenance and Management Support Service.

The Road Maintenance and Management Support Service is a total road maintenance service that detects road abnormalities from data collected by traveling vehicles, delivers this information, offers support for planning of repairs, and implements countermeasures. Tests to verify the efficacy of this service started in Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture, in October 2019 and are currently being carried out also in Toyoake City, Aichi Prefecture, and Shibushi City, Kagoshima Prefecture.

Accurate information on road conditions can be obtained through images and data from cameras and sensors mounted on garbage trucks picking up trash in the municipality, vehicles for shared shuttle bus service "Choisoko" and other vehicles. Furthermore, whether each of all the roads in the municipality is subject to management or not is distinguished by using location-based services technology that the Aisin Group has developed, capitalizing on its expertise in car navigation system development. Moreover, whether the roads that are subject to management have been already traveled over or not by the above-mentioned vehicles with cameras and sensors can be clarified by color-coding.

Finding an affinity between the functions of this service for exhaustively managing and distinguishing roads and PAC-MAN, eating up cookies along roads, Aisin Seiki and Aisin AW realized this collaboration with the help of BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment.

To encourage many municipalities to use the Road Maintenance and Management Support Service, the companies are considering having PAC-MAN, which is eating cookies on roads, appear on the output screen of this service, widely disseminating this service and its significance with PAC-MAN.

* Aisin Seiki and Aisin AW will merge their business operations to make a new start as Aisin Corporation on April 1, 2021.