United States Department of Transportation
i
Visual warning system for worker safety on roadside work-zones.
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2016-08-01
[PDF-1.50 MB]
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Abstract:Growing traffic on US roadways and heavy construction machinery on road construction sites pose a critical safety
threat to construction workers. This report summarizes the design and development of a worker safety system using
Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) to specifically address the workers’ safety for the workers
working around the heavy machinery. The proposed system has dual objectives. First objective is to improve
workers’ safety by providing visual guidance to the operators of the construction vehicles about the workers’
presence in the vicinity. This visual guidance keeps the operators of the heavy machinery well informed about the
whereabouts of the workers in close proximity while operating the heavy vehicle. The second objective of the
proposed system is to improve the work-zone traffic mobility by dynamically posting suitable speed limits and
other warning messages on the DSRC-equipped variable message signs (VMSs) depending on the workers’
presence in an active work-zone to appropriately warn the drivers of the passing-by vehicles.
A prototype was developed and field tests were conducted to demonstrate and evaluate the performance of the
proposed system. The evaluation test results show that the system can successfully show the presence of workers
around a construction vehicle on an Android tablet with acceptable distance (1.5 – 2 m) and direction (15 – 20
degrees) accuracies. Furthermore, the test results show that a DSRC-equipped VMS can successfully post a suitable
speed limit corresponding to the presence of workers in its vicinity.
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