Testbed for industrial advanced driver assistance systems

Abstract

Factories and industrial warehouses are environments in which accidents can be easily produced. People on foot work in the same place where heavy machinery is operating. Therefore, when accidents occur, they frequently have severe consequences. To reduce the number of accidents and their effects, there are strict regulations on the workplace and workers participate in regular training activities. In recent years, there has been a great evolution in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) specially in public road vehicles. With the proper design, these systems may also help to improve safety in industrial environments. For example, an ADAS may warn industrial drivers about nearby pedestrians. Nevertheless, the development of ADAS in this context is complex because industrial environments and their machines are very heterogeneous. Hence, this paper describes a testbed developed to assess the design of ADAS for industrial vehicles. The testbed includes all the elements needed to evaluate an industrial ADAS: hardware, an event management system, a simulator of a warehouse and, an evaluation methodology. To determine the effectiveness of the testbed, the assessment of an ADAS designed to warn industrial drivers about nearby obstacles has also been performed. The assessment includes a subjective evaluation of the testbed and of the cognitive load generated during the evaluation. The results of this assessment are very promising. They show that the testbed is realistic and that it is effective for ADAS designers to analyse the reactions of drivers to the signals produced by the assistance systems under evaluation.