In the January 2012 issue of POWER, the Construction Industry Institute (CII) presented a portion of its groundbreaking work on job site safety in “Real-time Proactive Safety in Construction.” That article explained how real-time tracking of worker and construction equipment locations can be used to efficiently notify workers on foot and those operating moving equipment of each other’s location, thereby avoiding collisions, injuries, and, sometimes, fatalities. Not included in that CII study were over-the-road trucks that most large construction projects rely on for delivery of time-critical equipment and parts.
POWER recently talked with Erika Jakobsson, a project manager at Volvo Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, who is responsible for developing intelligent trucks in response to European Union (EU) directives. According to Jakobsson, the truck of the future will have a digital co-driver on board, a virtual guardian angel that assists the driver or even takes over if the driver loses control. “We quite simply attach eyes to the truck,” says Jakobsson.
Causes of Truck Accidents
Weekends, accidents, bad weather, and road construction are some of the reasons for traffic snarls, but they all have one thing in common: Where there are traffic delays, there is also a risk of accidents. A survey by the European Truck Accident Causation Study shows that 47% of all truck accidents take place in monotonous situations such as traffic queues, with vehicles traveling in the same direction, or in stressful situations such as at crossroads and road construction. Now technology is being developed to help ensure that this type of accident becomes less frequent (Figure 2).
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| 2. Smart trucks under development. Volvo Trucks is developing over-the-road trucks with enhanced safety equipment that can automatically adjust to traffic flow and employ a temporary autopilot. Courtesy: Volvo Trucks |
Right now, the EU’s Highly Automated Vehicles for Intelligent Transport (HAVEit) project is focusing heavily on next-generation intelligent vehicles that can save lives and the environment through the development of advanced driver-assistance systems. The HAVEit project is developing a virtual co-driver that responds to the current traffic situation and the driver’s needs. “One of the challenges is how the vehicle should communicate with the driver, what sort of displays, voice functions, and so on it should have. We all have different temperaments, so the system must recognize when the driver is feeling irritated or calm,” says Reiner Hoeger, project coordinator for HAVEit.
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