Övers. av: Nollvision och ökad produktivitet vid vägarbeten

The main purpose of this project is to increase the safety at road-construction sites. The main long-term goal is to create the possibility for Volvo to reach zero accidents and high productivity for our customers. The focus has been on identifying safety risks at construction works, to develop an electronic safety cage (active safety functions), and to implement and test those in demonstrators. The goals for this project were: - Investigate accident data from roadside construction to increase the knowledge and understanding of the safety risks. - Define an electronic safety cage (active safety functions) to reduce the risk for accidents between people and machinery on construction sites. The productivity of the process should be taken into consideration. - Investigate sensor systems for absolute or relative positioning for people and machinery. - To implement a number of safety functions (chosen based on the result of the accident analysis) in a demonstrator. - Present the results using the demonstrator and presentations as well as dissemination of research results. - Appoint an industrial Ph.D. student within this area who will write a licentiate thesis within the project. To fulfill the goals, the work was carried out within five work packages. In the first work package, the accident situation was investigated. It was concluded that the most common severe accident is workers on foot being struck by either machines or vehicles from the traffic. In the second work package, possible safety functions to increase the safety at road construction sites were analyzed. It was decided that collision warning and automatic emergency brake functions should be implemented and demonstrated within the project. Those functions does not only have the potential to increase the safety in road construction but could potentially also be transferred to other type of machines and construction works. In the third work package, possible sensors solutions were investigated and the safety functions were developed. Three sensors system was used in the project: GPS including communication between units, stereo vision, and radar. They all had specific advantages but none fulfilled all requirements for optimal performance of the developed algorithms. One zone-based collision warning function was implemented where dynamic safety zones are used to assess the risk for collision. Moreover, an automated emergency brake function was developed which predicts if the driver could avoid an obstacle. If not, the brakes are automatically applied. In the fourth work package, the system and algorithm was integrated on construction machines. For the majority of the testing, the GPS with communication system was used. It provided information to the algorithm which warned the driver or automatically applied the brakes when a collision was imminent. In work package five, the project results were presented in several different ways. The activities include a number of demonstrations, presentations at conferences and universities.