AIR Option 1: Technology Translation: Development and Evaluation of Field Prototype for Determining Excavator Proximity to Buried Utilities

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This PFI: AIR Technology Translation project focuses on translating fundamental research findings in Georeferenced Augmented Reality (AR) and Emulated Graphical Monitoring to develop a technology for estimating excavator proximity to invisible buried utilities in real-time while a machine is digging. AR is the superimposition of computer-generated images over a user-view of the real world. Emulated Graphical Monitoring is the concurrent 3D visualization of an engineering process ongoing in the real environment. The translated technology has the following unique features: it can allow excavator operators to persistently see what utilities are buried in a digging machine?s vicinity, thus helping prevent utility strike accidents; it can also allow the monitoring of a working excavator?s proximity to buried assets, thereby enabling real-time knowledge-based excavator control. These features provide exemplary situational awareness, safety, and confidence to excavator operators when compared to the leading competing machine control technologies in this market space that are limited to providing grade control guidance during excavation. The project accomplishes is goals by pursuing an accelerated plan to develop and evaluate a field-deployable prototype of the technology for customer demonstration and evaluation along the path to commercial reality, resulting in a market-ready capability that can allow an excavator operator to be visually aware of buried underground utilities and other assets in the vicinity of a machine, and can offer quantitative feedback of machine distance to vicinal obstructions. The partnership engages DTE Energy Company (Michigan?s largest electricity and gas provider), Miss Dig System (Michigan?s One-Call excavation safety agency), and member companies of the Michigan Infrastructure Transportation Association (MITA) to provide guidance in the excavation safety market space and other commercialization aspects as they pertain to the potential to translate the developed technology along a path that may result in a competitive commercial reality. An excavator unintentionally hits a buried utility every 60 seconds in the U.S. causing fatalities, injuries, and property damage that annually cost billions of dollars. It is widely documented that these accidents occur either because excavator operators do not know where utilities are buried, or because they cannot perceive where the utilities are relative to the digging excavator. The potential economic impact of this project is expected to be the transformation of excavator operation from a skill-based activity to a knowledge-based practice, leading to improvements in productivity and safety within the next three years, which will contribute to the U.S. competitiveness in the burgeoning civil infrastructure construction and rehabilitation industry. Such benefits will also accrue in manufacturing, transportation, mining, and ship-building where transition from skill-based to knowledge-based processes is seen to be of value. The societal impact, long term, will be the reductions in construction and underground infrastructure life-cycle costs that will be possible through safe and efficient excavation.