Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Smart Hard Hats: Sensing for Worker’s Safety in Dangerous Work Environments

Version 1 : Received: 29 October 2020 / Approved: 2 November 2020 / Online: 2 November 2020 (14:22:18 CET)

How to cite: Ul Haq, E. Smart Hard Hats: Sensing for Worker’s Safety in Dangerous Work Environments. Preprints 2020, 2020110048. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202011.0048.v1 Ul Haq, E. Smart Hard Hats: Sensing for Worker’s Safety in Dangerous Work Environments. Preprints 2020, 2020110048. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202011.0048.v1

Abstract

Accidents and mishaps in industrial environments like construction, mining, and transport are rampant - mainly due to human negligence and improper monitoring of the workplace. In this paper, we address the safety of workers operating in dangerous environments by improving their situational awareness. According to Occupational health and safety rules, everyone must wear hard hats while on site. Our main idea is to make the hard hats smart by incorporating miniature-sized Doppler radars sensing the users’ surroundings. These Doppler radars are lightweight, rugged, and consume low-power compared to vision-based solutions. This paper discusses the observability of range from Doppler frequency measurements and the magnitude of estimation errors introduced by the human head, walking, and working motions. We present the framework to estimate the position of walls and targets surrounding the worker. For testing, we simulated an indoor environment with randomly moving workers. Experiments showed that once observability conditions are met, human head and walking movements can be handled through added noise in the system. We also present an innovative idea of using two Doppler radars to obtain the estimators’ initial estimates, reducing the estimation error to less than 5cm and convergence time by more than 80

Keywords

Construction safety; worker safety; Doppler radar tracking; Doppler Bearing tracking; Localization; Amplitude of returned signal; Kalman Filters; Unscented Kalman Filter; Filter initialization

Subject

Engineering, Automotive Engineering

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