Bringing AI to the Edge

This year, U.S. rail carrier Amtrak will be installing two novel inspection gateways from Duos Technologies along its busy Northeast Corridor. The barn-like Duos structures straddle railway tracks; as passenger trains speed through at up to 125 miles per hour, 97 cameras and dozens of LED lights arrayed around the sides, top, and bottom of the tracks will capture thousands of high-resolution images of the railcars. These images are aggregated and processed on site in real time to present a complete, 360-degree, highly detailed view of the train. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms running on Nvidia GPUs will analyze the images locally; if the model flags a potential structural or mechanical flaw, train personnel will be notified in less than a minute. The Duos portal is one of many new examples of what is loosely categorized as edge AI, or the deployment and operation of AI models outside of massive cloud datacenters.