Creating New Housing Style with IoT Application Products
In response to population aging, architect Hideki Hirahara points out the trend of “smart home”. According to him, in addition to environmental control covering temperature, humidity, and lighting, IoT is also used in home security such as smart door locks and automatic detection such as shutting down unused gas, water, and electricity supply to fulfill basic biological and security demands. To meet the human demands for saving time and convenience, optimizing command input methods, such as using the voice assistance system and integrated control platform, is another trend of smart life in the new era.
Take the commonly used voice control system on mobile phones and in-car systems for example. Besides the search for data based on voice commands, the Alexa smart voice assistant built-in Amazon’s smart equipment can observe the user’s habits, optimize equipment energy consumption, and optimize use scenarios with the machine learning technology to achieve learning automation through tracking the user’s habits. In education, some users build an immersive environment more suitable for language learning with smart voice assistance and other smart home products.
Integrated IoT Application: Wistron Smart Mall Robot with Advanced Deployment
Seizing the market demands, Wistron VP Chi-Ta Huang asserted that service smart robots will be popular in Taiwan as the case in Europe and USA. Hence, based on the IoT application technology such as voice control as mentioned above, Wistron launched the service robot “Wifundity” in May 2021 by integrating IoT and autonomous mobile robot (AMR) in collaboration with ADLINK Technology. This is an example of integrating IoT applications, AI, and other technologies in smart life related products.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has significantly reduced human contact and mobility. To minimize human contacts and fill up the labor shortage in such a critical situation, AMR development accelerated to expedite the birth of Wifundity. Wifundity integrates technologies such as facial recognition, AI computing, autonomous navigation, lidar detection, radar detection, and obstacle avoidance to become a smart robot that can give real-time responses to customer demands.
Wifundity is equipped with a processing system that supports such functions as product inquiry, shelf audit, AI recognition for precision marketing, one-button check-out, and so on. It is estimated that Wifundity can significantly reduce the routine odd job workload of mall keepers to focus on providing customers with higher-quality services to increase the service value of personnel. It is noteworthy that Wifundity can identify the age group and appearance of customers with AI to calculate product adverts that may meet the demand of customers with AI and big data calculation to make advertising decisions more smartly and make marketing more efficient.
In the future, Wistron will develop the new-generation virtual technology to support the applications required by multiple operating systems and design systems with greater compatibility, scalability, and flexibility in collaboration with Nvidia and Intel to build service robots for different scenarios and functions to meet the needs of different situations.
