Our 3D Situational Awareness (3DSA) tech has won the ‘2020 CSIRO DNFC Engineering & Technology Award’

Our (3DSA) technology provides an economical and scalable method to obtain real-time 3D situational awareness of anything that is/was moving (people, vehicles, materials, etc.) in a designated area, offering the unprecedented opportunity for real-time alerts, analysis, and continual optimisation.

The technology uses, but is not limited to, off-the-shelf security cameras to create a 3D reconstruction of the objects within the focus area. This creates unique challenges but offers greater value compared to expensive computer vision hardware.

To address these challenges, and to enable high quality real-time information, our team has put in a considerable effort to utilise all hardware resources (GPU, multi-thread CPU, etc) and to distribute the load over a computing cluster. These features are the cornerstone to providing a system that is scalable with built-in redundancy.

An initial case study has been the implementation of our the 3DSA technology in the manufacturing industry to help the safe commingling of Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs) and human workers. The system monitors both the entire path and the AGVs to alert the operators and AGVs of any potential collisions or blocked areas of the factory, resulting in reduced AGV downtime and increased human safety.

The 3D aspect of the technology allows for overhangs and small items to be detected, when these would normally be missed by the 2D safety LiDARs which are still prevalent in factory safety.

3D Situational Awareness is suitable for cutting-edge advanced analytics due to the comprehensive data it generates, which is not readily available to industry. It allows an overview of a full factory and its process flow, highlighting faults earlier then when they would normally be reported, and increasing productivity through improved flow optimisation.

One of our upcoming research and engineering tasks is to transfer this technology for outdoor use, where changing lighting conditions present additional challenges. This would extend its application beyond the manufacturing industry, exploring outdoor environments such as construction and mining, filling a gap in industry 4.0, by providing real-time information for promising productivity gains.

We are pleased with and thankful for the recognition of our efforts and advancements in this innovative technology. 

We are open to partnerships and collaborations for research, development, and commercialisation. 

For more information, contact us.