Vibration Alerting for Industrial Vehicles

Vibration Alerting for Tractors and Vehicles

At Precision Microdrives we love to hear about our customers’ applications. They’re usually pretty interesting, and it gives us a chance to think up some useful places to add our products too!

We have recently posted a few blog posts about people using vibration alerting in cars as safety features, notably Ford’s lane drifting alerting and Yale’s work on “vibro-alerting“ seats. It got us to thinking about other industrial vehicles that could really benefit from similar safety features.

Several ideas were suggested, some more plausible than others! But here are the picks of the bunch.

Overloaded Heavy Industrial Vehicles

Tractors and similar types of industrial vehicles are often used to carry heavy loads. Danger can easily arise when they are overloaded, where the unbalanced weight can cause them to tip over. Vibration alerting technology could be implemented into the user interface to warn the driver when there is an excessive load or if the vehicle is starting to tip.

Caravan Snaking

Snaking is the effect of a towed load swinging from side to side behind the vehicle towing it, which is common with heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) and caravans. A simple modification to the steering wheel or seat would allow the driver to be alerted to their load behaving dangerously. They would then know to take the appropriate action.

Crane Balancing

There’s a famous hoax that shows pictures of a car being rescued from a harbour by a crane. The crane is too light to pick the car out and also falls into the water. A second larger crane arrives on the scene, only to meet a similar demise. In fact, the last photo is faked, although the first crane really did fall in. It was remotely controlled by an operator, perhaps if they had a vibration alert in the remote they could have sensed and stopped before the crane became overloaded?

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