Publications / 2015 Proceedings of the 32nd ISARC, Oulu, Finland

Dynamic Equipment Workspace Generation for Improving Earthwork Safety Using Equipment Pose and State Data

Faridaddin Vahdatikhaki, Amin Hammad
Pages 1-9 (2015 Proceedings of the 32nd ISARC, Oulu, Finland, ISBN 978-951-758-597-2, ISSN 2413-5844)
Abstract:

Earthwork equipment accounts for a large proportion of the fatalities on construction sites. In the period between 1992 and 2002, struck by vehicles and struck by objects (e.g., vehicle parts, vehicle loads, or falling vehicles) were identified as the causes of 30% and 24% of deaths on excavations sites, respectively. It is therefore of a paramount importance to improve the safety of construction sites by increasing the peripheral awareness of the operators of earthwork equipment. Several researches have investigated numerous collision avoidance systems that exploit real-time location systems and proximity measurements to mitigate the risk of accidents on excavation sites. However, these systems often detect collisions based on using the workspaces that only account for the geometry and the degrees of freedom of the equipment, and thus disregard the job-site-and-state-dependent characteristics of equipment. This results in reserving a large space for every piece of equipment, which reduces the applicability of these systems in congested sites. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method for generating dynamic equipment workspaces based on the continuous monitoring of a spectrum of equipment-related information, i.e., the current pose/state of the equipment, and the speed characteristics of each movement. This method uses the required operation stoppage time to determine how much space needs to be reserved for each piece of equipment. A case study is conducted to validate the proposed method. It is shown that the proposed method has a strong potential in capturing the hazardous areas around the equipment and triggering warnings in view of the impending movements of various pieces of equipment. Also, the proposed method is proved to be very effective in congested sites where space is very limited.

Keywords: Dynamic Equipment Workspace, Earthwork Equipment, Real-time Location Systems