AiFi announces winners of autonomous retail competition
A team from Carnegie Mellon University has won autonomous stores startup AiFi’s AutoCheckout competition.
This was originally planned to run at the Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things (CPS-IOT) Week in Sydney, Australia.
AiFi and Carnegie Mellon University hosted the competition which was moved to an online setting due to the Covid-19 pandemic. AiFi, along with professors from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Stanford University and University of California Merced judged the competition remotely.
Yixin Bao, Xinyue Cao, Chenghui Li and Mengmeng Zhang were on the winning CMU team. They won for their multi-person shopping for cashierless stores solution. The platform is an end-to-end solution for autonomous shopping and receipts generation.
Eight teams from four continents competed in the contest. Participants came from nine universities: Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Harbin Institute of Technology, UC Merced, Georgia State University, Florida International University, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, RMIT University, and the University of Georgia; as well as one industry partner
For the AutoCheckout competition, techniques included vision-only, sensors-only and sensor fusion. Anything that required human manual interaction was not permitted. Competitors trained and tested their algorithms using a public dataset provided by AiFi. They remotely deployed their system and tested it before the final evaluation. Results were processed and then shown in an AiFi autonomous store’s infrastructure and servers.
“The goal of the competition was to bring together the smartest minds and ideas from around the world to inspire new innovations and developments,” says João Diogo Falcão, VP of Engineering, AiFi.
“Now more than ever, autonomous technology is critical. Not only is it more convenient with 24/7 shopping and real-time stock and behavior analysis, but it is also safer as our world tries to navigate our ‘new normal’ living with the current health crisis. We were really impressed with the hard work, commitment and creativity the groups presented during the competition. The future of autonomous shopping is bright.”