We envisage that this product will be used as a part of the building management system and smart city management system. Hence, the intended customers for the ARGOS project are Hotels, Cities, universities, stadiums, shops, or any facilities which have to manage a big group of people. In our first stage, we target the BMS companies such as Honeywell, which can incorporate our technology with their current systems.
The proposed technology targets a wide variety of commercial applications; below are several of the initial applications.
Building Owners / Occupants: Building HVAC accounts for 13% of all energy usage in the United States and nearly 40% of the buildings’ energy. Accurate occupancy detection can reduce energy use in HVAC systems by as much as 30%. Many issues come up when discussing occupancy detection when assessing accurate detection and privacy. This is where the proposed technology solves both, by relying on the vision to provide precise information and on-device analysis to ensure no image privacy data is transmitted.
Municipalities: Traffic light planning is difficult already without accounting for pedestrians. Pedestrians congregating at an intersection can cause safety issues for all vehicles and people. Accurately determining the counts of pedestrians, vehicles, and bicycles is a difficult task for existing technology in the market. The proposed technology allows for simple integration of counting of people, cars, and bikes, and removes concerns that big brother is watching. Additional analysis can be performed by providing count data – if pedestrian counts are not changing, there may be a need to modify traffic patterns or alert first responders. Starting with simple, actionable data is the first step in this process, and the proposed technology achieves this.
Autonomous Vehicle Manufacturers: An autonomous vehicle’s vision and detection systems
are only as good for as far as the devices line of sight. How can a car know what is happening at an intersection before it arrives? This is where the proposed technology steps in, again providing accurate, simple data that can be actionable in a vehicle system. This is a crucial part of the V2I or I2V infrastructure to the vehicle system.
Market Intelligence – Realtors, Retailers: When commercial real estate is valued, it is often
based on the number of vehicles driving by, but what if it could be for the number of people who
spend time at an existing or nearby venue? What if it was for the pedestrian and bike traffic. This technology provides a way to count the number of visitors (and unique visitors) without privacy issues and with simple data. Retailers wanting to know how long a person looked at a display can now do so in an unobtrusive way.