AAEON, an industry leader in IoT and AI Edge platforms, has cooperated with a US manufacturer to help develop and deploy an AI system designed to help speed up drive-thru service at a wide range of businesses. The system is powered by the BOXER-8221AI compact edge system with NVIDIA® Jetson Nano™.
With the vast majority of communities in America designed around car-centric transportation, drive-thru service is common across a wide range of businesses, including fast food, banks, pharmacies, coffee shops, and even florists. During high-traffic times, such as lunch and rush-hour, lines in drive-thru lanes can often become quite long. The current pandemic has exacerbated the situation with many businesses choosing to close their lobbies or dining rooms in favor of drive-thru only. Even as governments seek to re-open, businesses are maintaining these practices out due to cautious health practices or labor shortages causes by the health crisis.
These issues cause what were already long lines prior to the pandemic to become even longer, with both customers and delivery drivers having to wait in long lines for food, which can cause impatient drivers to leave before they are served, and increase air pollution from idling vehicles. One company in the US is helping to alleviate the situation with a solution that utilizes AI to help speed up drive-thru service.
Their solution leverages both AI technology and big data analysis to help with allocation of workers and tasks by predicting customer demand based both on the number of vehicles in line, but also the type of vehicles. By cross referencing vehicle types with a database of past orders, the system can promote the kinds of meals or purchases the driver is more likely to make, reducing ordering time, and further reducing the time spent in line. Businesses can set conditions based on vehicle type to also help create a preparation plan before the customer even places their order.
The manufacturer of the system uses the BOXER-8221AI from AAEON, along with a camera to perform AI analysis at the drive-thru ordering kiosk. The BOXER-8221AI is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, delivering energy efficient performance that delivers processing speeds up to 472 GFLOPS, perfect for object recognition and data processing at the edge. The BOXER-8221AI is compact and features a dust-resistant fan-less design, with flexible I/O loadout, perfect for deploying at the edge, wherever it's needed.
"The BOXER-8221AI offers a compact rugged design capable of operating in wide temperatures, from -20 °C to 50 °C without reduction in performance, perfect for the varying conditions of surveillance applications," said Jessy Chen, Product Sales Manager with AAEON. "This drive-thru system has already been deployed in hundreds of installations this year, and is expected to reach mass deployment next year."