Based on RFID and visual recognition technology, hydrogen purchase will be a full-category intelligent vending cabinet solution

【)】Reported on January 5 (Text/Han Wenjing)

Under the trend of new retail, the trend of unmanned retail is gradually emerging. As a part of unmanned retail, vending machines have ushered in a period of rapid development in the past two years.) The HGO BOX I recently learned about is a smart vending cabinet that uses RFID, antenna, electronic tags, machine vision, deep learning and other technologies to make the entire process of scanning the code to open the door and receiving the goods and deducting fees simpler and faster.

The core barrier to hydrogen purchase lies in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and visual recognition technology. Based on the team's many years of IoT technology foundation in the field of smart cabinets, the cost has been reduced to half that of its peers. Product identification is carried out through RFID tags. At the same time, based on the RFID solution, The provision of visual data ensures algorithm accuracy. Although RFID technology has existed for many years, it has only been applied to the retail industry and smart vending cabinets in the past two years.

As a developer of intelligent software and hardware in the retail industry, Hydrogou has in-depth cooperation with Ant Financial and Tencent WeChat Pay to create a 24-hour shopping space for users while providing offline user data, sales data, and credit data to merchants. and other information.

In November 2017, Higou received an angel round financing of RMB 6 million from Pioneer Financial. Capital believes that Higou smart vending cabinets are an innovative industry within the retail industry, with no restrictions on product categories and great potential for future development. The hydrogen purchase smart cabinet market is open to the whole country, and this year’s plan is to provide solutions for 50,000 devices.

The profit model of Higou has two aspects. One is to provide core solutions for the big business end. For customers with back-end systems and suppliers, Higou provides core detection, reading and writing, and communication equipment; the other is for small businesses. On the B-side, Higou provides a complete set of solutions, from backend, equipment to maintenance, providing comprehensive support for products and technologies.

"The expansion speed of our project can exceed that of traditional smart vending machines in the short term, and even innovate the current smart vending machine system," Li Zili, founder of Hydrogen Gou, told), as a segment within the retail industry, smart vending cabinets’ method of selecting first and paying later has subverted people’s understanding of vending machines. This may be the development direction of unmanned retail in the future.

At the level of competition in the same industry, Li Zili said that compared with pure visual solutions on the market, hydrogen shopping adopts the most stable and reliable technology iteration method, which is mainly based on RFID. It can do technical excavation and innovation, and provide feedback on background visual algorithms. . At present, the company is doing artificial algorithms on the one hand, and providing real data feedback through vision on the other hand, and making complex solutions.

The team’s founder Li Zili is a Ph.D. from Wuhan University of Technology. He has worked in the smart express cabinet industry and is an expert in the field of smart vending cabinets; co-founder Lu Wenjie has many years of retail experience and has been involved in the fresh food O2O industry; technical partner Liu Yong, He is a Ph.D. from Wuhan University. There are currently about 30 people in the team, and those working on 85% are technical R&D personnel, all from universities such as Wuhan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Wuhan University of Technology.

Project: Hydrogen Purchase
Company: Wuhan Qinggou Cloud Technology Co., Ltd.