30,521 research outputs found
Sensor-Based Safety Performance Assessment of Individual Construction Workers
Over the last decade, researchers have explored various technologies and methodologies to enhance worker safety at construction sites. The use of advanced sensing technologies mainly has focused on detecting and warning about safety issues by directly relying on the detection capabilities of these technologies. Until now, very little research has explored methods to quantitatively assess individual workers’ safety performance. For this, this study uses a tracking system to collect and use individuals’ location data in the proposed safety framework. A computational and analytical procedure/model was developed to quantify the safety performance of individual workers beyond detection and warning. The framework defines parameters for zone-based safety risks and establishes a zone-based safety risk model to quantify potential risks to workers. To demonstrate the model of safety analysis, the study conducted field tests at different construction sites, using various interaction scenarios. Probabilistic evaluation showed a slight underestimation and overestimation in certain cases; however, the model represented the overall safety performance of a subject quite well. Test results showed clear evidence of the model’s ability to capture safety conditions of workers in pre-identified hazard zones. The developed approach presents a way to provide visualized and quantified information as a form of safety index, which has not been available in the industry. In addition, such an automated method may present a suitable safety monitoring method that can eliminate human deployment that is expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming
Extra care housing: a paradigm shift
This paper sets out to investigate if and how a spatial typology for extra care housing (ECH) can be defined within the context of housing for older people in the UK. In particular, it focuses on the concept of domesticity in relation to the perception of public, semi-public and private domains.
Four sheltered housing schemes that have been remodelled into ECH within the past four years, have been selected as case studies. The spatial distribution of various public, semi-public, and private domains of the pre-remodelled and
remodelled schemes have been analyzed quantitatively and interpretively, to determine how their distribution might help bolster or undermine the ethos behind ECH. Likewise, the spatial layouts of the sheltered, as well as the extra care
schemes have been analysed syntactically, to determine how different spatial morphologies and their probabilistic functions might begin to help define ECH as a new type of group housing for older people.
The findings of the paper suggest that the extent to which the spatial configuration of a scheme affects one’s notions of self-containment and control, has a direct impact on whether the scheme performs as a building or as a settlement. It is furthermore argued that the more a scheme functions as a settlement, the less institutional it may feel. Thus, as a typology, a successful
extra care scheme can be defined as a building that works as a settlement
Obstacle Avoidance and Proscriptive Bayesian Programming
Unexpected events and not modeled properties of the robot environment are some of
the challenges presented by situated robotics research field. Collision avoidance is a basic security
requirement and this paper proposes a probabilistic approach called Bayesian Programming, which
aims to deal with the uncertainty, imprecision and incompleteness of the information handled to
solve the obstacle avoidance problem. Some examples illustrate the process of embodying the
programmer preliminary knowledge into a Bayesian program and experimental results of these
examples implementation in an electrical vehicle are described and commented. A video illustration
of the developed experiments can be found at http://www.inrialpes.fr/sharp/pub/laplac
Proscriptive Bayesian Programming Application for Collision Avoidance
Evolve safely in an unchanged environment
and possibly following an optimal trajectory is one big
challenge presented by situated robotics research field. Collision
avoidance is a basic security requirement and this
paper proposes a solution based on a probabilistic approach
called Bayesian Programming. This approach aims to deal
with the uncertainty, imprecision and incompleteness of the
information handled. Some examples illustrate the process
of embodying the programmer preliminary knowledge into
a Bayesian program and experimental results of these examples
implementation in an electrical vehicle are described
and commented. Some videos illustrating these experiments
can be found at http://www-laplace.imag.fr
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