The act of transporting goods from ‘point a’ to ‘point b’ is changing. The trucks being driven are changing, the roads are changing, road safety is changing, the technology surrounding the entire industry is changing. Compared to 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, much of the road transport sector is almost unrecognisable.
Some of that change has, unfortunately, adversely impacted the industry. The skilled driver shortage is at its all-time worst, the quality of roads across the country is deteriorating, and HVNL fines are becoming harder to pay.
However, much of that change – especially on the technological side – is looking to future-proof the industry at a time where it needs to be bolstered and brought into the new technological age.
Sensen.AI is one company whose impact on the transport industry is only, realistically, limited by the imagination of those who are integrating the technology into the sector. At the current time they have just expanded their partnership with the NHVR to continue to supply their camera and sensor technology to the regulator, but that could be just the beginning of a diverse range of technological influences it could have on the sector.
That range of potential influences, according to Sensen.AI Chief Commercial Officer Nathan Rogers, is all progressing towards one important common goal.
“The goal is to have a safer road transport network,” Rogers tells ATN.
“Maybe there’s a world where trucking companies opt in to have a Sensen product in their truck, and the fleet operators can use live awareness to manage their fleet and to train people.
“For example, there are a lot of difficult driving routes in Australia, and there are a lot of drivers coming from elsewhere who may not have driven those routes before. Live awareness could guide them and alert them, and that could reduce training and onboarding times.
“I think we could help the industry, from a productivity point of view, get people on the road faster.
“One of our current pieces of technology is we have an AI copilot concept that talks to the driver, and the driver can talk back to it. That’s not impossible to apply to a live awareness platform for every truck in Australia.
“I think the future is in the actual fleet side technology rather than regulator technology. Maybe they can opt in to the Sensen.AI copilot and use the technology. It can be like using a computer when it asks, ‘do you agree for this data to be sent to Microsoft?’, but it’s ‘do you agree for this data to be sent to a regulator.
“If you do that, it could be you get pulled over less because your truck is being monitored anyway from a safety and compliance perspective.”
But what is Live Awareness? How new is it in the technological landscape? And what are the limits of its application in the transport sector? Sensen.AI founder and CEO Subhash Challa explained.
“The whole concept from day one to now was taking data from live camera and sensor feeds and create a level of intelligence which is pretty close to what humans can do” Challa says.
“It’s a real-time awareness of what’s happening in the physical world. The physical world is the key point here because sensors are needed.
“The core idea is to capture whatever is happening in real time, create the data and marry that with the contextual data – then you create an intelligence that’s unlike anything else.
“If we look at Hawkeye for cricket, that’s Live Awareness. They look at that thermal camera, they look at ball tracking, they look at the rules. That’s live awareness done in a very bespoke manner and it only works for that, but the beauty of what Sensen.AI does is it has multiple applications.
“So, a software technology that can marry that, extract that data from the camera sensors and the contextual data is a live awareness platform, and it can go into lots of enterprises.
“Within that you can already see the breadth in what we do. There’s the NHVR, there’s the parking sector, previously we disrupted the casino market, we delivered Live Awareness DRS for club-level cricket and there’s still unlimited scope within it.”
Right now, those fleet applications previously discussed by Rogers largely remain conceptual or untested, but with this type of AI learning technology, the only true limiting factor is the ideas that can be had for its application.
The heavy vehicle compliance space is just one of a number Sensen operates it. From traffic management to parking to ports all over the world, it’s a company with a huge span of expertise, and lessons learned from one sector in one country can be immediately applied in another.
While some may think it would be easier to knuckle down into one or two key target areas – much like Challa’s cricket DRS technology example – he says it’s more pertinent to keep a broad scope of application for the technology for the future of the company and improvement of the product.
“It’s a question of strategy more than anything,” he says. “Some people might choose one space and say, ‘our product is well proven here’, but what I would say is most companies who tried the one product strategy failed, and there’s a good reason why they failed.
“The time to acquire customers in our market is high, it takes time. So, what do engineers and salespeople do when you’re waiting between contracts? We need something to sell, and we need something to build.
“My strategy was to maximise the throughput of our research and development and the throughput of the sales and engineering teams. We are creating a highly diversified, highly resilient business which is highly profitable – and that’s a rare combination.”
As with any discussion around camera technology – AI or otherwise – questions around privacy and data protection are inevitably raised.
It all comes back to the wider conversation surrounding smart cities versus surveillance. Yes, the addition of more cameras, sensors and trackers could improve a variety of things including public safety, traffic control, emergency service response, but – if used incorrectly – it could reduce data and individual privacy of citizens around the world.
Rogers was keen to stress the goal of Sensen’s technology was compliance measurement, not surveillance, and strong steps have been taken to ensure privacy and anonymity of the public remains intact.
“There are two really important things we do with masking at Sensen,” he says.
“The first is what’s called ‘masking on the edge’, so the moment the frame is captured by the camera, masking is applied, and the original is discarded. Even as the vendor we can’t reconstruct the scene of an unmasked person.
“We just don’t have it.
“We’ve had times where we’re trying to troubleshoot an issue and it would be far easier to solve the problem if we had the unmasked image, but there is no way for us – or anyone – to access it.
“Second, we chose to mask the full body, not just the face, and that’s for the trust of our customers.
“When our customers look at the images and incidents, if the whole body is masked, they can trust what we do is not at all about surveillance and it’s not about looking at people. It’s purely about compliance.”
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