Amazon and UVeye

Overview

Amazon partnered with UVeye to transform last-mile fleet inspections with AI-powered automation. By replacing manual Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports (DVIRs) with Automated Vehicle Inspection (AVI) systems, Amazon has improved safety, reduced maintenance costs, and minimized downtime across its global Delivery Service Partner (DSP) network.

The Challenge

Amazon operates a vast fleet of more than 100,000 delivery vans and delivers 20 million daily packages.

• Manual Inspection: Drivers and technicians traditionally relied on visual, manual inspections to check for damage, wear, or defects. These human eye inspections risked the possibility of missing subtle defects.
• Operational Risk: Small issues could escalate into safety incidents, breakdowns, delivery delays, and higher maintenance costs. Amazon needed a faster, more accurate way to detect problems early.

The Solution: Automated Vehicle Inspection (AVI)

Launched in 2020, Amazon and UVeye co-developed AVI, an AI and computer vision-driven system that scans vehicles in seconds as they return from routes.

• Drive-through simplicity: The AI system performs a full-vehicle scan in a few seconds, identifies problems, classifies them based on severity and immediately sends the results to a computer.
• AI-driven accuracy: Identifies defects with 96% accuracy vs. 24% manually, spotting even the smallest anomalies in Amazon delivery vans.

“It can catch everything,” Bennett Hart, a DSP Partner, said. “And it’s essentially instantaneous.”

• Cloud-powered scale: Integrated with AWS for seamless deployment across hundreds of delivery stations in the U.S., Canada, UK, and Germany.

Key Benefits

• Improved safety of nearly 280,000 drivers who help deliver packages 
• Data-driven fleet: Insights into hidden damage patterns (e.g. 35 % of issues are tire-related) help improve the safety of fleets 
• Standardized compliance for thousands of independent DSP partners
• Instant Insights: Vehicle scan data is processed in under a minute on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and displayed in Amazon’s Fleet Portal, where fleet managers see detected issues with photos and repair suggestions.

The Future

In the future, the AVI technology could be used to support all sorts of delivery vehicles, inspecting not only the exterior, but the interior of vehicles. “The potential is huge,” said Tom Chempananical, global fleet director at Amazon Logistics, noting it could also influence routing and geolocation when damage patterns appear in the same area.

Reference:

Amazon unveils new AI-powered technology that will inspect delivery vans and help keep drivers safe.