Refine
H-BRS Bibliography
- yes (19)
Departments, institutes and facilities
Document Type
- Conference Object (9)
- Article (5)
- Patent (3)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Year of publication
Has Fulltext
- no (19)
Keywords
- Circular saws (1)
- Hand injuries (1)
- Light curtain (1)
- Protective system (1)
- Raman spectroscopy (1)
- Safety guard (1)
- detection (1)
- displacement measurement (1)
- estimation (1)
- light curtains (1)
The proper use of protective hoods on panel saws should reliably prevent severe injuries from (hand) contact with the blade or material kickbacks. It also should minimize long-term lung damages from fine-particle pollution. To achieve both purposes the hood must be adjusted properly by the operator for each workpiece to fit its height. After a work process is finished, the hood must be lowered down completely to the bench. Unfortunately, in practice the protective hood is fixed at a high position for most of the work time and herein loses its safety features. A system for an automatic height adjustment of the hood would increase comfort and safety. If the system can distinguish between workpieces and skin reliably, it furthermore will reduce occupational hazards for panel saw users. A functional demonstrator of such a system has been designed and implemented to show the feasibility of this approach. A specific optical sensor system is used to observe a point on the extended cut axis in front of the blade. The sensor determines the surface material reliably and measures the distance to the workpiece surface simultaneously. If the distance changes because of a workpiece fed to the machine, the control unit will set the motor-adjusted hood to the correct height. If the sensor detects skin, the hood will not be moved. In addition a camera observes the area under the hood. If there are no workpieces or offcuts left under the hood, it will be lowered back to the default position.
The device (10) has a handrail (18) provided with an optical contactless monitoring device formed as an active sensor system, where the monitoring device is arranged in a region of a guide (14) of the handrail at a front base (16) of an escalator (12) or a moving pavement. The monitoring device has two transmission paths (28, 30) with wavelength bands that are different from each other, where one of the paths includes the handrail. Ratio or difference between signals of the paths is used for recognizing foreign bodies e.g. hands of adults and children.
This paper presents recent research on an active multispectral scanning sensor capable of classifying an object's surface material in order to distinguish between different kinds of materials and human skin. The sensor itself has already been presented in previous work and can be used in conjunction with safeguarding equipment at manually-fed machines or robot workplaces, for example. This work shows how an extended sensor system with advanced material classifiers can be used to provide additional value by distinguishing different materials of work pieces in order to suggest different tools or parameters for the machine (e.g. the use of a different saw blade or rotation speed at table saws). Additionally, a first implementation and evaluation of an active multispectral camera system addressing new safety applications is described. Both approaches intend to increase the productivity and the user's acceptance of the sensor technology.
The use of manually fed machines (e.g. table saws) bares risks of injury that are clearly above the average level of other high risk workplaces.
The wide use of such machines causes severe problems for occupational safety and implies high costs for medical treatments and accident annuities.
This thesis presents a new concept of a multispectral sensor to monitor an area in front of a danger zone to detect the user’s limbs and trigger safeguarding measures to prevent an accident in time.
The sensor concept realizes a contact-free material classification, which comprises the development of a system design and specific safety requirements with respect to international safety standards.
Furthermore, a prototypical implementation using four wavebands, which were determined for skin detection through an analysis of reflectance spectra acquired specifically for this purpose, was built.
At previous SIAS conferences, we presented a novel opto-electronic safety sensor system for skin detection at circular saws jointly developed with the Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance (IFA). This work now presents the development results of our consecutive research on a prototype of a sensor system for more general production machine applications including robot workplaces. The system uses offthe shelf LEDs and photodiodes in combination with dedicated optics and a microcontroller system to implement a so-called spectral light curtain.