Rule-Based Automated Safety Monitoring System for Work Zone Safety

Despite efforts by the construction industry, many fatalities and injuries are still occurring due to dynamic and complex construction site conditions as one of the reasons. To overcome the limitations of manual safety monitoring, recent studies have developed worker tracking systems using different wireless technologies to track the location of the worker inside construction sites. The research community has also designed solutions tracking vehicles in construction sites with wireless technologies. Among these wireless technologies, ultra-wideband (UWB) radios have more potential to provide feasible and accurate localization due to impulse-shaped signals and high bandwidth. The newer generation of UWB systems introduced precise location tracking of up to 2 cm – 15 cm accuracy in a controlled environment without requiring extensive infrastructure. These UWB technologies hold a lot of promise to automatically detect unsafe situations in road construction sites by accurately tracking locations of workers and equipment. Past studies demonstrated the potential of UWB technology to enable accurate location tracking of resources in construction sites. However, the performance of radios significantly degrades when there is an obstruction or blockage in the communication signal between the transmitter and receiver causing Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) situations like in a road construction environment with vehicles and heavy equipment. This Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) project developed a robust real-time UWB based location tracking and monitoring system called vehicle pose estimation using UWB radios (ViPER) that eliminates the effects of NLOS situations when they occur, thereby improving localization performance in those challenging scenarios. This project also designed and implemented a new localization approach and boundary estimation algorithm that accurately calculates the distance between tracked entities. Different configurations of ViPER were tested, evaluated, and visualized both for line-of-sight (LOS) and NLOS situations using Unity 3D application to show the experimental results from this study and finally, in a road construction site to track and estimate the distance between vehicles, equipment and workers for accurate localization. The results from these tests indicate tremendous improvements in location accuracy and update rate that are critical in the development of a safety management system.

• Record URL:
  • https://www.trb.org/Main/Blurbs/182778.aspx
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) project was conducted by the University of Houston.
• Authors:
  • Gnawali, Omprakash
  • Kim, Kyungki
• Publication Date: 2022-5

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 40p
• Serial:
  • NCHRP-IDEA Program Project Final Report
  • Issue Number: 206
  • Publisher: Transportation Research Board

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Construction equipment; Construction safety; Construction sites; Line of sight; Monitoring; Road construction workers; Safety management; Technological innovations; Tracking systems; Wideband communication systems; Wireless communication systems; Work zone safety
• Identifier Terms: Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) (Program)
• Subject Areas: Construction; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01851959
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: NCHRP IDEA Project 206
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jul 20 2022 4:26PM