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Even in today's highly-connected world, humans still play a vital role in work environments, and most present-day heavy-duty mobile equipment operate in proximity to humans. Functional Safety was born to ensure equipment systems can detect, diagnose, and safely mitigate incidents to prevent harm to humans and machines. By proving, testing, and documenting the system design process, functional safety is now a critical element to any/all systems installed within heavy-duty mobile equipment, factory options, and aftermarket machines.

Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) is used extensively in the cabs of heavy-duty OEM equipment both on and off-road, and allows a person to interact with a machine, like an instrument panel, the joystick, the steering wheel, the brakes, the knobs and buttons of the infotainment system, Etc.

As customers continue to demand driver awareness, assistance, and autonomous features to improve safety — regulatory and societal pressure trends point to the expansion of OEMs offering these solutions as optional and standard features. Today, this expansion points in the direction of Radar sensors as one of the key solution elements.

Advancements in the Adoption of Proximity Detection Systems

PRECO Electronics® has seen advancements in a few ways. The adoption of proximity detection systems has been one of the most prominent trends to date. Proximity detection is a solution born of the intention of bolstering the safe operation of machines – designed to improve operator awareness through identifying objects and/or people in dangerous blind spots.

How does Side Defender®II differ from the Sentry® blind spot monitoring system? Are the systems designed to be used in tandem with one another on a vehicle? What applications are each system best suited for?

PreView Side Defender®II and PreView Sentry® were designed as blind spot monitoring systems. Each is equipped to handle different proximity detection needs and scenarios within the heavy-duty industries.

Functional Safety

The goal of functional safety is to ensure that organizations provide dependable products to external customers.

As PRECO’s solutions have grown, our products have also begun the testing process with non-automotive applications. Increasingly collaborating with the automotive industry and developing products for fully autonomous automotive vehicle applications. A trend that further emphasizes the need for increased safety oversight described as Functional Safety[i]. 

In previous posts, we’ve looked at the difference between RADAR and LiDAR, and between RADAR and ultrasonic sensors. While there are significant differences between these three types of sensors, they have one thing in common: They are all used to increase safety by identifying and locating both still and moving obstacles relative to the path of a vehicle. RADAR sensors do this by emitting radio waves. LiDAR uses high frequency laser light. Ultrasonic sensors emit high-pitched sound waves.

Developing smart vehicles requires a tradeoff: As the vehicle gets more intelligent, it also gets more complex. You can look no further than the number and kinds of sensors newer vehicles now come equipped with to appreciate just how complex. These vehicles that once started as little more than an engine, four wheels, and some brakes have become highly sophisticated computers on wheels.

PRECO Electronics® has been designing and manufacturing short range radar sensors since 2001.  Extensive testing of these sensors is required to validate operation.  Older versions of the PreView® Radar sensors had a short detection range (<10 meters) and the PRECO engineering team has been able to do much of the performance testing on an indoor test range.  The latest generation of PreView® sensors, such as the Sentry™, have a much longer detection range of 30 meters, necessitating a different testing area.

It’s no secret that in order to be successful, a company requires two things: a healthy bottom line and a clean safety record. As technology improves and data tracking becomes easier, safety and savings can go hand in hand.