Abstract
Recently, different solutions leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been adopted to avoid accidents in agricultural working environments. As an example, heavy vehicles, e.g., tractors or excavators, have been upgraded with remote controls. Nonetheless, the community continues to encourage discussions on safety issues. In this framework, a localization system installed on remote-controlled farm machines (RCFM) can help in preventing fatal accidents and reduce collision risks. This paper presents an innovative system that exploits passive UHF-RFID technology supported by commercial BLE Beacons for monitoring and preventing accidents that may occur when ground-workers in RCFM collaborate in outdoor agricultural working areas. To this aim, a modular architecture is proposed to locate workers, obstacles and machines and guarantees the security of RCFM movements by using specific notifications for ground-workers prompt interventions. Its main characteristics are presented with its main positioning features based on passive UHF-RFID technology. An experimental campaign discusses its performance and determines the best configuration of the UHF-RFID tags installed on workers and obstacles. Finally, system validation demonstrates the reliability of the main components and the usefulness of the proposed architecture for worker safety.
Highlights
The need of guaranteeing worker safety both in indoor [1] and outdoor scenarios has been gaining interest in recent years due to its social relevance [2,3,4]
For instance, heavy vehicles, such as tractors, have been recently upgraded to be remotely controlled with the main aim of avoiding accidents such as roll-overs, which can be fatal to workers
The first two paragraphs present the specific experiments conducted on the UHF-RFID tracking system, while the final paragraph presents the functional validation of the overall architecture
Summary
The need of guaranteeing worker safety both in indoor [1] and outdoor scenarios has been gaining interest in recent years due to its social relevance [2,3,4]. The different obstacles and dangerous situations faced by workers every day, impose the respect of a lot of rules defined by institutions to reduce and, if it is possible, completely prevent risks to which they are exposed in their common actions and routines. With the aim of guaranteeing safety of workers in their daily duties, different technologies and methodologies have been introduced. For instance, heavy vehicles, such as tractors, have been recently upgraded to be remotely controlled with the main aim of avoiding accidents such as roll-overs, which can be fatal to workers
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