UVeye’s Vehicle Inspection Technology Turning Heads at CES
Vehicle inspection technology proving to be most pragmatic use of AI
While the impact artificial intelligence has had on the automotive and the hospitality industries have been major media talking point to embellish the high-tech future of these economic sectors, the reality is that the innovation at this point has had mixed results. Nowhere is this more evident than in autonomous vehicles, which despite the progress reported by the likes of Waymo, is still years away from all-out commercial viability.
But more realistic applications of artificial intelligence are showing results in other areas, especially in vehicle inspections, as evidenced by the presence of Israel-based high-tech firm UVeye at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which ends Friday.
The company has particularly been grabbing the attention of fleet managers, especially car rental companies, demonstrating the economic amenities of its rollout of automated vehicle inspection systems.
UVeye is showcasing three of them. One of them is Atlas that provides a 360-degree scanner to check out the external parts of a vehicle. The company is also showing off Artemis, designed to assess the condition of tires from tread wear to sidewalls. And then there’s Helios, a system that focuses on automobile chassis and other parts of the undercarriage.
The company, which hasn’t taken a particularly extravagant approach to its promotion, unlike its autonomous vehicle counterparts, is happily operating under the hyperbole radar. They’ve so far scored deals with the likes of Skoda, Daimler, Toyota and Volvo, with the latter company revealing plans to add Atlas and Helio systems to its manufacturing and dealership operations worldwide.
While UVeye might be in the driver’s seat in pushing boundaries for future automation, its arrival to the market has been much more pragmatic, since their product lines have been created as a response to higher labor and material costs.
Besides UVeye, which certainly stands to reap dividends from its CES appearance, other automated vehicle inspection system companies are also seeking toeholds in this new market. France’s Proovstation also uses 360-degree scans and like UVeye, promises that vehicle fleet companies will get a return on such an investment in the form of cost-saving efficiencies in maintenance.
Britain’s Ravin, which specializes in 3260-degree automobile inspection technology which can even by controlled on a mobile phone, recently announced a partnership with the Avis Budget Group, which is interested in its product line. In November, U.S. company Scope Technologies announced a similar system that also uses artificial intelligence and cloud-based data storage.
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