Can Pedestrian Presence Sensors Reduce Injuries?

Pedestrian presence sensors are the pieces of hardware that has the ability to view its surroundings. Traditionally located at the opposite end of the forks, pedestrian presence sensors have a single task… keep an ‘eye’ out for human beings and objects that can injure a worker, and cause damage to the product, facility and the equipment.

Pedestrian Injuries

According to a report published by Monash, found that 45% of forklift truck accidents include an injured pedestrian. The cost of a pedestrian injury in a forklift accident is a trickly one. When a forklift injury occurs, you pay for the initial cost of the person going to the doctor or to the hospital to get checked out. Then maybe a couple of x-rays to ensure something is or isn’t broken, poked or bleeding internally. Once that is done, that doesn’t mean the situation is over or the costs have ended.

After the initial injury, the person may need follow up doctor visits, or the worker may report continuous pain or inability to move fully and completely. This ongoing situation can and will cost companies in further hard and soft costs. These costs can include, but not limited to medical bills, therapy, additional tests, and doctor visits to name a few. Then  in the workers absence, additional costs incurred can include the hiring of a temporary worker or workers, additional training, production losses, and reduced efficiencies to name a few. That’s why this little proximity camera or pedestrian presence sensor is vital to the forklift safety solution.

Pedestrian Presence Sensors

Pedestrian presence sensors have a single job to do. Continuously view what’s going on. That’s it. That’s all the camera detection equipment is to do. The next piece of technology takes over. Depending on the forklift safety system, it works differently.

Some forklift detection sensors detect a person and an object equally. Meaning, it does not, and cannot tell the difference between the person or an object. All that it notifies is that something is there in its traveling path. However, SIERA.AI has a true pedestrian presence sensor. At SIERA.AI, with the use of machine learning AI, we’re able to detect and identify the difference between a human being and an object.

What Comes First the Pedestrian or the Object Detection

SIERA.AI’s pedestrian presence sensors communicate what it’s seeing and let’s the machine learning AI technology determine if it’s a person or an object. Once defined, it immediately informs the forklift operator of the presence of a person with a symbol of a person or if it’s an object, a symbol of a box. This allows the forklift operator to take action.

What if It’s Both a Person and an Object?

You might think of this scenario as the chicken and the egg question. Well, in this situation, we can clearly say that if it’s a choice between notifying of a pedestrian or an object first, the pedestrian wins. There are many times where both will be present, especially when the worker is in front of, on the side of or behind boxes.

This is where pedestrian partial detection comes in. This is critical as this is where the proximity camera detects part of the human body from behind an object. It certainly is very feasible that a worker is on all fours, reaching in to stack product and part of their legs are sticking out. We identify it.

Or if the worker is getting up off the floor from behind the boxes and it starts with the arm, moving to the top of the head. We identify it again.

Partial human detection can be captured with the forklift detection sensors. That’s why it is vital that the pedestrian presence sensors communicate what it sees so the machine learning technology can report the presence of a human being first, and the object second.

Trial

The best way to understand the effectiveness, or how good the SIERA.AI S3 Pedestrian Detection System (PDS) is, is to trial it out in one of your facilities. Experience it for yourself. Let’s not forget the telemetry Dashboard. This is where the data resides and your analysis begins. You’ll get this in the trial too!

Contact us today at sales@siera.ai to get your trial started.