Supporting construction personnel in the safety and planning of construction activities performed at high elevations via augmented reality technology

Abstract

Due to the nature of construction, many of the tasks and activities tend to lead to the occurrence of accidents. The major causations of the accidents in construction industry are fall from height and being struck by falling object. The tasks to execute the safety and prevent the hazards of these causations consist of design and planning, monitoring, and training. The process of each task are carried out based on the project information, which represented by two dimensional and paper format documents accompanied with the construction personnel’s knowledge and experiences. However, the actual work conditions at the construction site are dynamic environment and contained the inhered hazards. Thus, the execution of the tasks to prevent the mentioned hazards sometimes requires the information of actual workplace for supporting in the safety considerations. Normally, the in-charge personnel convert, generate and integrate mental three dimensional pictures regarding safety with the actual environment by themselves. However, it is difficult, burdensome, and error prone. Additionally, it depends on the level of experience, knowledge, and individual perspective of undertaker. Therefore, the innovative and proactive approach for supporting the construction personnel regarding safety management in real time and actual environment via Augmented Reality (AR) technology is developed. The approach provides the virtual safety information and superimposes it on the real world scene. The prototype system, which named Visualized Safety Management using Augmented Reality Technology System (VSMART System), was developed to assist the in-charge personnel in the following tasks: 1) design and planning for preventing the hazards of falling object, 2) design and planning for arrangement of safe work areas, 3) monitoring, and 4) training. The projectile calculation and collision detection algorithms based on the computer vision techniques are developed to analyze the potential hazards of falling objects, the capability of designed falling protection system, and the virtual unsafe zone when operated crane and performed construction activities. Three functions in the prototype system, which consisted of providing the visualization of possible hazards from falling object, illustrating the unsafe working areas, and presenting the virtual objects regarding safety were tested in both laboratory and real environment. This proposed system was implemented at the real high rise construction project. The experiment results showed that this system is feasibly applied for design and planning task to provide the unseen and unforeseen information in the actual work environment and to envision the construction personnel in safety aspect prior the construction activities begin. For the monitoring and training, this system can support the project participants in communication.