SALT LAKE CITY, UT, November 16, 2022 /24-7PressRelease/ -- ASI Logistics has announced another revolutionary step in their development of autonomous yard trucks. ASI Logistics is the first company focused on yard truck automation to develop and deploy their own Trailer Number Recognition Software (TNRS) technology. Trailer number recognition software allows autonomous yard trucks to read trailer numbers and relay the number back to Mobius (ASI's command and control software for autonomous yard trucks). TNRS is a critical component to automating this phase of the supply chain.
Jeff Ferrin, Chief Technology Officer, said, "ASI Logistics is developing vision-based trailer number recognition software based on deep learning to automatically recognize the trailer numbers of the trailers around the yard truck. The recognition software is trained with images from the yard so it can have the required accuracy with the used trailers. ASI's Logistics Trailer Number Recognition Software allows the yard-shifting system to reliably pick up and deliver the correct trailers without requiring user input into the system. This is another enhancement to improve the efficiency of the autonomous yard truck system."
The (TNRS) is an image processing system that enables yard trucks to know which trailer they are approaching without human feedback. The yard management system (YMS) tracks where trailers are located in the yard, using the trailer's number as an identifier. TNRS is a time-saving element of an autonomous yard operation because:
1. Humans do not have to intervene to confirm a trailer number
2. It detects if the YMS has a trailer in the wrong location, and relays it to YMS
During the first step, areas containing trailer numbers in a scene are extracted. Following extraction, the character parsing stage finds individual characters from those areas. Then, small image segments representing characters are processed in the optical character recognition step. The output is a set of characters that represent a trailer number. This staged approach enables ASI to easily develop and use new extractors without throwing away good character parsers and recognizers or vice versa.
Many companies use off-the-shelf deep learning systems for similar text recognition problems, but reading trailer numbers is very different than reading a PDF or road signs. Trailer numbers occur in different orientations and environments. ASI has custom applications for developing and testing deep learning systems that can easily be plugged into a stage in the TNRS. Instead of balking when a customer wants a system for their unique yard, ASI can update a stage in the TNRS that will work for their use-case without having to start from scratch.
In the current implementation, customers must confirm the trailer number reported by TRNS through ASI's user interface, Mobius. ASI is anticipating customer needs and actively improving the accuracy of their TRNS to reduce human intervention in autonomous yard operations.
With this announcement of Trailer Number Recognition Software, ASI Logistics is making strides to launch their autonomous yard truck solution. ASI continues to be at the forefront of the autonomous yard truck industry.
ABOUT ASI
Autonomous Solutions, Inc. (ASI) is a world leader in industrial vehicle automation. ASI serves clients across the world in mining, agriculture, automotive, government, and manufacturing industries with remote control, teleoperation, and fully automated solutions from its headquarters and 100-acre proving ground in northern Utah.