Yahoo Autos UVeye Is Automating Vehicle Inspections
From the July/August issue of Car and Driver.
Like Viagra and Propecia, drugs initially developed to treat heart and prostate issues and not performance concerns and hair loss, UVeye's automated vehicle-inspection system was born from an unexpected outcome. The Israeli company originally intended its inspection tool, dubbed Helios, to serve as a homeland-security device that could scan for explosives strapped to the underside of vehicles.
"We started finding more [fluid] leaks than guns or bombs," says Yaron Saghiv, the chief marketing officer of UVeye. Consequently, the company changed its business model, shifting resources toward the automotive industry. In 2018, Škoda installed a UVeye scanner at its tech incubator in Israel. Others got onboard, and partnerships with automakers such as General Motors and Hyundai followed. Now, with UVeye's tech scanning more than 50,000 vehicles each month, the company's algorithms continue to expand their knowledge base.
Helios remains the backbone of UVeye's technology. Its three cameras quickly examine a vehicle's underbody, taking thousands of images that are stitched together to form a complete picture. Using artificial intelligence, including computer vision to extract information from this portrait and deep learning to look for anomalies, Helios can point out leaks and damaged or missing components. In the case of rust, it even distinguishes surface-level severity, displaying degrees of corrosion as a heat map.
A separate inspection tool, Artemis, detects external irregularities on the wheels and tires. This four-camera system (two per side) analyzes each tire for sufficient tread depth. It also looks for inconsistent wear resulting from poor alignment, and it flags the tires' date codes, as well as damage to the sidewalls or wheels. It's not always perfect, though. We employed a 2006 Honda Pilot to test UVeye's technology, and while Artemis spotted scrapes and dings on the wheels and accurately measured the tires' tread depth, it failed to find the date codes.
Another system, Atlas, looks at body panels and other exterior pieces. Two variants are available: a large model for big commercial vehicles such as those Amazon uses and a smaller one for passenger vehicles. The latter setup incorporates 16 cameras, which work with contrasting strips of bright light and black stripes to detect dents, scratches, paint issues, rust, broken glass, and other imperfections larger than two millimeters. Atlas caught many of the numerous dings and scratches dotting the Pilot, as well as the rusted rear wheel arches; however, it missed a sizable crescent-shaped crack at the base of the windshield.
Upon gathering the data, UVeye uploads the information to its database and sends the results back to the operator. With the tech transferring the data at a speed of about 100 megabytes per second, that entire process—from the moment the vehicle leaves the scanner to the downloaded report—takes just 20 to 35 seconds to complete.
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