Editor's note: TriStar's smart camera platform is one of two entries in the machine vision category for the 2023 Industrial Design, Engineering & Automation (IDEA) Awards, which highlight the key innovations in product design across the industry. IDEA Award winners and honorees are chosen by the engineering community for the Machine Design, Electronic Design, Power & Motion, Microwaves & RF, and Vision Systems Design brands.
Tristar AI’s smart camera platform tracks and analyzes human actions on the factory floor and alerts supervisors in real time to potential quality issues, reducing downtime and errors.
Tristar (Boston, MA, USA) says its AI-enabled approach is designed to address the shortcomings of legacy methods of monitoring the manufacturing production process, such as supervisors’ visual observations or self-reports from line staff.
The cameras, which are mounted strategically in the factory, monitor critical workstations. To protect the privacy of individual employees, the software automatically implements facial blurring and full-body obfuscation.
Born out of research at MIT and Harvard University, the platform is equipped with software that recognizes human actions depicted in camera footage. How? Tristar uses an approach in which human motion is analyzed as a series of small actions, such as raising an arm, that combine to provide a more complex action, such as lifting a box or turning a valve.
Using this approach, Tristar says its AI-enabled software can be trained to recognize any human task.
In addition to real-time alerts, the software also aggregates visual data that supervisors can review via dashboards.
Using the Tristar platform, customers have logged results such as a palletization error rate close to zero or a scrap rate reduction of 30%. The platform also prevented a vacuum pump failure which would have resulted in a two-week downtime at a producer of automotive fluids.
“At Tristar AI, we believe that computer vision technology has the power to transform the way we interact with machines and equipment. By monitoring human behavior and tracking compliance, we can create safer, more efficient workplaces and prevent costly mistakes,” explains Salem Karani, CEO of Tristar AI.
Read about the other IDEA Award Nominee in the machine vision category.
About the Author
Linda Wilson
Editor in Chief
Linda Wilson joined the team at Vision Systems Design in 2022. She has more than 25 years of experience in B2B publishing and has written for numerous publications, including Modern Healthcare, InformationWeek, Computerworld, Health Data Management, and many others. Before joining VSD, she was the senior editor at Medical Laboratory Observer, a sister publication to VSD.