It has been started today the LOGIS project, born to increase safety in port areas. Thanks to the fundamental contribution of the Tuscany Region (LOGIS is among the 2012 R&D granted projects) innovative systems will be developed to help drivers of reach-stakers and forklifts avoiding accidents with ground personnel. Due to the distraction and fatigue of personnel, every year a number of serious accidents is registered in Italian and Worldwide ports. The big and heavy vehicles (their empty weight can reach even 100 tons) used to move containers around the port usually have large blind spots. In case a ground operator enters into one of these portions, the risk of accidental collision rapidly increases, because the human driver cannot see him. Automatic People Detectors will be developed by the LOGIS consortium and integrated to the vehicles as a supplemental artificial eye, capable of identifying ground people by using the most advanced artificial vision techniques. System features will include pedestrian’s distance estimation, so different alerts (audio, visual) will be used to warn the driver in different situations. In case of fatal injury risk, the vehicle will come to an automatic stop.
The LOGIS project involves Port Technical Service (Coordinator), Pitom (Innovation&Technology Responsible) and Puccioni Vasco (Carpentry Responsible), and will end in June 2015.