Researchers Develop Construction Site Warning System
Engineering360 News Desk | August 27, 2015Volvo Construction Equipment and Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are partnering to develop and use technologies to improve construction-site safety by providing greater awareness of the surrounding environment for machine operators.
Students in the CMU College of Engineering developed SiteAware, which fuses data from several sensors to give machine operators “an accurate, real-time representation of their current work environment.”
SiteAware has two sensor stacks per system, each one including three RGB cameras with a 130-degree field of view, and a LiDAR sensor with a 360-degree field of view. Ground personnel are given RFID tags, which communicate with sensors on the machine. The machine has a screen that displays the data gathered by these sensors so that it can communicate where other machines and personnel are located.
The screen flashes and the system sounds a warning alarm when another machine or a person gets too close.
If the possible collision is with a worker, the system recognizes him or her from their RFID and calls to them by name. The research team says that this helps to cut through the noise of the construction site.
“We gave the students a simple mandate, without any restrictions or limitations: to design the future road construction operator’s workplace, with an emphasis on safety,” says Dr. Fares Beainy, a research engineer in Volvo’s CE Emerging technology department.
News articles: