The “zero accident” objective in the workplace is a major challenge for many companies. Incidents involving pedestrians and mobile equipment such as excavators, wheel loaders and material handlers are still happening! Businesses that have strong safety values realise this and implement effective traffic management solutions to protect people.
The French group Arcure has developed Blaxtair®, a cutting-edge intelligent pedestrian proximity detection solution, enhancing safety around industrial vehicles (forklift trucks, wheel loaders, excavators etc).
Answering the need of a customer, Blaxtair worked with Xwatch Safety Solutions to provide a solution to allow automatic slowing down of a vehicle – based on Blaxtair pedestrian detection – to make the protection of on-site personnel even more fail proof. The Xwatch engineers designed and integrated a proportional slow down solution with Blaxtair.
Blaxtair is made up of three main parts: The stereoscopic camera looks after the area within its field of view, especially in the vehicle’s blind spots. The processing unit analyses the captured images, recognises and localises people in real time, thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms. The on-board screen or LED/Buzzer within the cabin alerts the driver through visual and audible alarms if a person is detected in the defined danger zone. Thus, when a pedestrian enters the cameras field of vision, the system quickly processes the information in real time and immediately activates the proportion slew slow-down control system, which is powered by Xwatch. This ‘slow-down’ action is performed as an autonomous action by the machine as opposed to driver.
Franck GAYRAUD, CEO of Arcure Blaxtair explained, “Using Artificial Intelligence, Blaxtair is the only smart 3D camera able to distinguish a person from another obstacle in real time and alert the operator to the danger, without unnecessary alarms, in industrial environments. Blaxtair enhances people safety, working conditions and productivity.”
Franck GAYRAUD continued, “This kind of partnership allows us to accompany the trend towards autonomous and smart vehicles, addressing a growing demand among machine users, such as HS2 contractors.”
Dan LEANEY, Sales and Operations Director of Xwatch Safety Solutions said, “ We are very happy to work with Blaxtair to provide the company with a global safety solution by integrating the Xwatch ‘creep control’ slew slow down control system. The Xwatch solution is extremely flexible and is interoperable among various systems. It enables the Blaxtair system to identify personnel around the machine and connect with the Xwatch solution to slow the machine down.”
Dan added, “This system vastly improves on the people/plant interface – and gives the operator more confidence and peace of mind that the area set around the machine is going to be protected. Also, should there be an incident, the embedded recording allows post event assessment.”
