US: Volvo Construction Equipment has partnered with the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon to use new technologies to improve construction-site safety by providing greater awareness of the surrounding environment for machine operators. The proposal — called Site Aware — fuses data from a number of different sensors to give machine operators an accurate, real-time representation of their current work environment. There are two sensor stacks per system, and each one includes 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. Included inside the machine is a screen that displays the data gathered by these sensors in order to show her where other machines and personnel are located. When another person or machine gets too close, the screen flashes and the system plays a warning sound from the direction where the possible collision was detected. If the possible collision is a worker, the system recognises them from their RFID and calls them out by name. The team explains that this helps to cut through the noise of the construction site.
Source: Construction week online
