YI Tunnel Showcases Its AI Solutions for Retail at the 2nd China Unattended Retail Conference

BEIJING, August 22, 2018 (Newswire.com) - “The items in YI Tunnel’s freezer can be displayed in any way or even upside down,” said a young man with the surname of Zhang. “This is not like other freezers based on weight sensing or static vision recognition, which have very high requirements on how the items are displayed. And look, the items can be displayed in real time on the screen. Isn’t that cool?” When it was his turn in the line, while speaking, Zhang scanned a code to open the freezer’s door and take a bottle of coke for himself and a bottle of orange juice for his colleague from it. And then, he closed the door and left seemingly without paying for his purchase. People were so skillful to operate the vending machine. This shows that many of them are professional visitors to the exhibition.

The 2nd China Unattended Retail Conference & Shanghai International Unattended Retail Exhibition 2018 co-sponsored by the China Commerce Association for General Merchandise (CCAGM), the Unattended Retail Branch of CCAGM, and the Self-service Retail Branch of CCAGM was recently opened at halls E1-E3 of the Shanghai New International Expo Center.

The event has three exhibition areas with nearly 400 exhibitors covering multiple fields including unattended retail terminals, retail technologies, and products, as well as merchandise & supply chain services. YI Tunnel was invited to the trade show with its portfolio including the AI vending machine, the AI checkout robot, and the smart shelf management system. The smart vending machine mentioned above, which is popular and cool, is the YI Tunnel AI vending machine recently being circulated on China’s social media. It is currently the world’s only commercially viable AI vending machine purely based on vision recognition.

The concept of unattended retail isn’t ahead of its time, but when it comes to the innovative way of empowering unattended retail with AI, YI Tunnel is arguably the first one to do so in the industry. AI is just technology at the end of the day, and only when there are the right industries and right scenarios for AI to demonstrate its commercial value, can companies remain undefeated after the aura around AI is gone. 

There are numerous unattended retail products showcased at this year’s event, but there aren’t many AI solutions for retail that can be put into commercial use like those of YI Tunnel. Quite a few visitors came to the event out of their admiration for YI Tunnel, and they claimed that the company’s vending machine has “a very fast recognition speed” and “really accurate recognition”, and is “the only machine that dares to display the code of merchandise in real time”, even without personally giving it a try.  After learning many other advantages of the YI Tunnel AI vending machine, they began to talk about cooperation with the staff at YI Tunnel’s booth. 

Besides, YI Tunnel also reproduced an unattended checkout scenario of the food industry at the exhibition, attracting a lot of visitors to give it a try. According to the staff, YI Tunnel’s checkout robot currently is already able to recognize more than 30000 types of merchandise, including both standard items and non-standard items. Just by taking a “look,” the machine will be able to recognize an item. For non-standard items, it can also weigh them. And the machine’s built-in systems including facial recognition system and membership system can be connected with retailer’s back-end systems.  

“This checkout robot can be applied in various scenarios such as grocery stores, major canteens, restaurants, and bakeries. It’s a very good option for optimizing the checkout process, and we hope to collaborate with YI Tunnel as soon as possible,” one of the visitors told someone around him. 

And besides YI Tunnel’s smart shelf management system, many people from major retailers revealed their pains in shelf management. They have a very urgent need for the digital operation of tallying and restocking etc.  For this, YI Tunnel can digitize shelf information through the computer vision technology, to monitor shelf display, merchandise condition, and sales performance in real time, and to help retailers realize the smart prediction of sales and supply for their shelves. 

Today, YI Tunnel’s AI solutions for the retail industry include the AI vending machine, the unattended store, the checkout robot, and the smart shelf management system etc. In front of YI Tunnel’s unattended store, AI vending machine or smart shelf management system, just by taking a look, a camera will be able to determine a customer’s gender, expression, and action. And then, the system can perform big-data analysis to the shopping data of customers including their holographic interest tags, all their motion trajectories, as well as data on their actions of taking items and putting them back in conjunction with their payment data. 

As Yili Wu put it, YI Tunnel wants to digitize all offline retail transactions through AI-based computer vision and then replaces the traditional ERP system through the deep integration between AI and big data for retail decision-making. Ongoing AI data operation eventually will be able to optimize and direct the front-end and back-end operations across the industry’s value chain, he said. 

Today, YI Tunnel has become the first to build a mature business model for AI application in retail. It is working together with top retailers and brand partners to drive a new era in retail. Are you ready?

Source: YI Tunnel