PerceptIn Introduces ‘Intelligent’ Advertising Vehicle

Santa Clara, California-based PerceptIn, a computer software company that bases its technology on visual intelligence, announces the debut of its DragonFly Intelligent Advertising Vehicle, which will be on sale in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2019.

The company says the DragonFly enables advertisers to offer a mobile, on-demand and computer-vision-powered out-of-home advertising vehicle that can engage directly with consumers. PerceptIn says its product uses advanced computer vision and robotics technology to make the vehicle go to where consumers are, and the software is also integrated with location-based services that will provide retailers and advertisers with insights on customers based on their location data and/or time of day constraints, or a combination of both.

The company says that during a 15-minute test run in a commercial shopping area, the DragonFly Intelligent Advertising Vehicle was able to attract more than 1,000 viewers. Approximately 58.2% of these viewers were “highly engaged,” as they viewed the advertisement for more than five seconds.”

“We designed the DragonFly Intelligent Advertising Vehicle as a way to bring intelligence to an area of advertising and retail that had little to none,” says Dr. Shaoshan Liu, founder and chairman of PerceptIn and recipient of more than 150 U.S. and international patents on robotics and autonomous driving. “Our intelligent advertising vehicle technology offers the next pioneers of commerce the ability to easily connect the digital to the offline world and set up their own visually engaging ‘autonomous showroom’ quickly and affordably.”

The company says the DragonFly is ideal for certain environments, such as convention centers, corporate and educational campuses, amusement parks and malls. Along with digital signage the vehicle also comes equipped with a vending machine; consumers can safely “hail” the vehicle from their mobile device or stop the vehicle when they see it to buy somethung.

“Cost-effectiveness is a crucial factor for ubiquitous deployment when it comes to building an affordable and reliable autonomous vehicle for any industry. Nonetheless, affordable perception sensors may impose challenges to the motion planning sub-system,” says Liang He, chief scientist at PerceptIn. “What is unique about PerceptIn’s motion planning system is that we use recurrent deep neural networks to approximate systematic noises, which may include control noise, perception noise and localization noise, thus we were able to enable reliable and safe autonomous mobility on affordable hardware.”

PerceptIn is now selecting customers for their self-driving vending machine pilot program in the U.S. The DragonFly Intelligent Advertising vehicle will be available for purchase in the U.S to select customers in the first quarter of 2019 for $40,000.

Click here to watch a short video of the vehicle in action.