There is a driver shortage. Driver pay is increasing rapidly after years of stagnation. Drivers have choices. So, it came as a great surprise to me when Dale Willis, the Vice President of Data Services at Netradyne, said that his company’s camera and AI-based analytics system, used to improve driver safety, is appreciated by truck drivers! In my experience, drivers do not like Big Brother. I was skeptical.

Media contacts for Netradyne did arrange a call with me with a driver, fleet safety executive, and safety training manager at Ward Transport and Logistics Corporation to attempt to confirm the outlandish allegation that drivers appreciated this technology. Ward Transport, a fourth-generation family owned company, primarily engages in less-than-truckload shipments.  They have a fleet of 600 vehicles.

The reason Ward Transport wants to expand to the rest of the fleet is that the system works well, it is the best video quality Mr. Dunn has seen. The camera, attached to the truck’s windshield, has cameras that face to the left and right, face forward, and face the driver. The cameras have a high enough resolution that in the event of an incident, reflected images picked up from the mirrors attached to the side of the truck can in many instances be viewed to determine what happened beside the vehicle.

Source: Analytics India Magazine

Here’s the first trailer for our upcoming documentary on Artificial Intelligence in India. Today we spend more time behind the wheels then we would have a few years back. In Cities like Banglore where the roads are shrinking and number of vehicles increasing exponentially the situation is even worse. We already convey distance in terms of time rather than Kms. On an average, a person spends 3-4 hours a day behind the wheel. While we all are struggling to claim our share of the downtrodden roads we fight with a variety of stakeholders ranging from stray cows to speeding Taxi drivers.

Vascor Transport

Since its earliest days in a new country, the northwest corner of Ohio has always been a manufacturing hub. Today the region is dominated by auto manufacturers and suppliers. And that business – along with their demand for just-in-time parts deliveries, is the bread and butter of Vascor Transport, a regional-haul fleet based in Georgetown, Kentucky, right on the Ohio border.

The bulk of the fleet concentrates on regional hauls to and from automotive parts suppliers east of the Mississippi River, according to Chris DeRose, vice president of operations for Vascor, including regular routes into Indiana, Virginia, and northern Alabama.

Because of the wealth of information Vascor gets from Driveri, DeRose and his team were able to expand their driver pay bonuses to include operational bonuses.

“We wanted to increase driver pay, but we also wanted to get something in return for that commitment,” DeRose says. “Driveri gives us the tools to do this. As a result, we’re a safer fleet, and we can offer our drivers up to $3,900 a year in bonus pay. This year, that will work out to around $500,000. But if we get safer, have fewer accidents with no third-party lawsuit claims and burn less fuel – who knows? Maybe in a few years we’ll have $1 million in bonus money we’ll be able to pay out over the course of a year.”

Computer vision combines machine learning, data processing, and AI to develop innovative solutions that find use cases on a daily basis.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words – and computer vision could perhaps make it worth much more.

A field of computer science that works to help computers see, identify, and process images much like human vision does, computer vision offers endless and exciting possibilities. Closely linked with Artificial Intelligence, computer vision also provides the appropriate output that exceeds the limitations of the human eye.

Computer vision combines elements of machine learning, data processing, and analytics. It is fundamentally about processing images and coming up with use-case models. For example, in a typical driving scenario, the sudden appearance of an object in front of the vehicle could have multiple results. But in a computer vision-enabled scenario, these possibilities are minimized as the object is noticed much before the human eye can.

In India, a significant number of computer vision startups are engaged in processing images whose use-cases are being deployed in eCommerce, medicine, security, transportation, industrial automation, security, etc.

From tires to cabs, big rigs are getting smarter with new systems aimed at getting trucks to run safer, more efficiently and with lower operating costs.

Technology firms, including Netradyne — have designed camera systems that record both the driver and the road to capture video of dangerous incidents and provide coaching and analysis of driver actions.