Collision Prevention Systems in Industrial Applications

Any industry that deals with heavy-duty vehicles will understand the importance of collision prevention systems. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, contact with objects/equipment is one of the top three causes of injury or even fatality for industry workers, from oil & gas extraction to coal mining to construction. In fact, 2020 statistics show that 716 US industry workers lost their lives due to contact with equipment.

Carroll Technologies is dedicated to finding the best equipment and working with industries to calibrate custom safety solutions ideally suited for the application to ensure that workers are kept safe, even in the most adverse of environments.

Collision Prevention Systems for Heavy-Duty Vehicles

The basis of most collision avoidance solutions is an effective tracking system, which can monitor the positions of workers and pieces of equipment to ensure that they don’t come into contact with one another. This can take the form of tags, worn by workers and attached to machinery and vehicles, which feed information into a control centre, ensuring a human operator can see the relative position of everything.

These collision avoidance systems also include alarms and alerts that trigger when two tags are moved too close to one another, providing an early collision warning system to prevent collisions from taking place.

These proximity detection functions can be customized, enabling larger or smaller safe zones to be established for individuals and machines of different sizes, creating a system where alarms are tailored to the scale and function of individual operations.

Large, above-ground operations may also utilize GPS tracking. While satellite solutions require companies to have access to this level of technology, they can save on operational costs and minimise equipment usage in the long-term, as satellite tracking removes the need for individual people and objects to be tagged.

Holistic services are increasingly popular, with companies such as Carroll offering tracking and communication services using the same technological base, and could significantly reduce the likelihood of collisions.

Collision prevention systems provided by Carroll include PBE’s collision avoidance system, which uses EM (electromagnetics), RFID, GPS and bi-directional radar at the same time for accuracy that can be configured to recognize different groups (such as vehicle types or personnel). Additionally, the dash-mounted PAS-Z Proximity Alert System alerts drivers to the presence of personnel, vehicles and obstacles.

The PAS-ZR is a ruggedized version of PBE’s standard collision avoidance system, specifically designed for both above and below ground vehicles in the construction and mining industry.

Further Reading:

Collision Avoidance: Systems, Devices & Equipment in the Mining Industry

Collision avoidance systems for cranes