Methods for improving visibility measurement standards of powered industrial vehicles

Poor visibility of powered industrial vehicles, such as forklifts, used in industry is often the cause of accidents that include pedestrians. Current standards allow up to 20% non-visible regions for forklifts where measurement of these regions is performed by using lamps. A collaboration of research organizations, including National Institute of Standards and Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology (NIST), and Direct Dimensions, has been evaluating advanced methods for measuring a forklift operator's visibility. These methods can potentially improve visibility standards. They can also aid forklift and sensor manufacturers to (a) perform different facets blind spot analysis without requiring extensive and time consuming infrastructure set up (b) develop techniques to efficiently utilize visibility-assist sensors and (c) find the optimal location where worker-on-foot or obstacle avoidance proximity detection and avoidance sensors or alerts can be mounted on forklifts. This paper includes explanation of visibility measurement experiments performed and results, associated language suggested to standards organizations, and a prototype design for measuring the visibility of forklifts automatically.