Pedestrian detection in industrial environments: Seeing around corners

Situational awareness for industrial vehicles is crucial to ensure safety of personnel and equipment. While human drivers and onboard sensors are able to detect obstacles and pedestrians within line-of-sight, in complex environments initially occluded or obscured dynamic objects can unpre dictably enter the path of a vehicle. We propose a safety system which integrates a vision-based offboard pedestrian tracking subsystem with an onboard localisation and navigation subsystem. This combination enables warnings to be communicated and effectively extends the vehicle controllers field of view to include areas that would otherwise be blind spots. A simple flashing light interface in the vehicle cabin provides a clear and intuitive interface to alert drivers of potential collisions. We implemented and tested the proposed solution on an automated industrial vehicle to verify the applicability for both human drivers and under autonomous operation.