Development of Electronic Safety Aids for Large Plant Vehicles
Author: Richard Ian Stone
Publisher:
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 266
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA large number of heavy plant vehicles are utilised within the quarrying, mining and construction industries in order to facilitate the type of operations inherent to this type of industry. The use of such vehicles unavoidably results in safety hazards which, in some cases, can be reduced by use of contemporary electronic techniques. A development programme was completed over a two year period to expand and enhance the range of electronic safety aids for heavy plant vehicles manufactured by Ogden Safety Systems Limited. The work comprised the re-design of the signal processing element of a current product, an anti-collision microwave radar, for use during vehicle reversing and the design and development of a new product, intended to be a low cost method of brake testing such vehicles. Both products made use of digital signal processing techniques based on a 16-bit single-chip microprocessor with algorithms coded in the high level language C. The design of both products made extensive use of common hardware and software building blocks in order to reduce development time. The radar system used a varactor tuned Gunn oscillator microwave device as the detection element and the brake testing device utilised a micro-machined silicon accelerometer as the sensing element. Suitable analogue signal processing circuitry was designed for each product to condition the analogue signal from the relevant sensing element into a form suitable for digital signal processing.