AI Assistant Scans And Greet Museum Visitors

(Credit: MCW Media and Photography)

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations to rethink the way they operate. The same is true of a Canadian museum that is home to the largest collection of operational military vehicles in North America. Said vehicles at the Ontario Regiment Museum, require constant maintenance to remain functional, which involves skilled volunteers tending to their needs periodically.

Once the pandemic hit, the museum had to rethink the way it conducted its operations. Thankfully, the facility already had a virtual assistant, meant to greet and interact with visitors. Built by CloudConstable, the assistant, Master Cpl. Lana, was then reconfigured with Intel RealSense and AI tech, to allow it to scan volunteers.

Housed in a system with an LCD panel for her face, Lana leverages intel’s state-of-the-art natural voice and vision interface with touch-less capabilities, for her tasks. This has been found to be exceptionally useful due to social distancing requirements. Working on the front lines, she is the museum’s first line of defense against those infected with COVID-19.

Lana uses Intel’s depth camera and Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit for machine vision inferences. In addition to this, she also fitted with the NUC 9 Pro with Intel Active Management Technology. Lana can conduct thermal scans and ask a series of questions to access COVID-19 risk and exposure of volunteers.

She is now a fully automated and touch-less screening system that will enable volunteers to return to work, safely. Cloud Constable is working to integrate these new systems with Lana’s original profile as a virtual helper. She will greet visitors, provide contactless check-in, scan temperatures, maintain visitor limits and other COVID-19 health protection protocols.