KD-Secure
When KD Secure mentioned that they had a project whose scope would include crawling all over construction cranes, we immediately started flexing our muscles. The plan involved more than excellent climbing skills though; KD Secure's goal is to create an intelligent construction site using a sensor network and patented event correlation technology. The system will monitor near misses and generate alerts in real time to prevent accidents by catching problems before they become emergencies.
There is, of course, more to creating an intelligent construction site than just climbing up cranes. The concept involved improving the safety of a construction site by monitoring events in many domains — including fall protection, crane safety and severe weather — so our plan of attack was two-fold. Not only would we prototype a variety of sensor technologies and networking options, but we also considered the entire undertaking as a whole in order to determine how to best serve a construction crew's needs. In order to find the answers to our questions, we went straight to the source, having detailed discussions with everyone from crane operators to safety trainers.
Once we got to work on the fall protection project, we built a prototype "smart harness" with the ability to detect whether a worker was properly clipped in. For the cranes' sensor array, we found there were available solutions that we could put to use; there was no reason to spend months building (and billing) something that was readily available. We used rapid prototyping to combine these pre-existing components into a system that provided capabilities never before seen on a construction site.
Right away we were able to see that, for the intelligent construction site’s sensors to do their job as efficiently as possible, they would need a reliable network. Hundreds of sensors would operate at each construction location and needed to communicate with each other and send alerts up the chain of command when dangerous conditions were detected. In order to build our prototypes quickly we put Arduino, an open-source physical computing platform, and XBee, a peer-to-peer wireless radio, to work for us, with python and the twisted framework making up the network management layer.
Our main goal wasn't simply to create the workings for an intelligent construction site — we needed to rapidly iterate on ideas and generate prototypes under a tight deadline. KD Secure is a safety and security product company and the intelligent construction site concept wasn't our first collaborative effort. In the past, we had provided a variety of services focused around finding innovative and patentable solutions to difficult problems. For this project, we worked closely with KD Secure's team to come up with several new patentable ideas, and created prototypes to prove they were feasible in the real world. It was truly a collaborative process, something we aim for with all of our clients and partners.