Intelligent door control
In industrial halls, doors are often opened completely, regardless of the actual door users (people, vehicles). As a result, more air than necessary escapes from the hall. This causes both unnecessary energy costs and unpleasant working conditions. Intelligent monitoring of the door environment allows the door opening to be adapted to the situation depending on which object is approaching the door: this promotes productivity, saves heating energy and increases working comfort.
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Initial situation
In industrial environments, open gates cause significant energy losses due to air infiltration. There is a clear need for intelligent industrial door openers to minimise air flows every time the door is opened.
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Solution SCS
In a joint project, SCS developed Hyperion 3D: a stereoscopic system which
- "understands" the 3D scenery around industrial gates
- opens gates as high as necessary / closes them as fast as possible
- does not open gates in case of cross traffic
- calibrates itself during installation -
Added value
An automatic and adaptive door opening for each passing vehicle or person prevents unnecessary door openings by blocking out cross traffic. This saves energy and costs.
Project insights
Industrial requirements
In industrial halls, doors are often opened completely, regardless of the actual door users (people, vehicles). As a result, more air than necessary escapes from the hall. This causes both unnecessary energy costs and unpleasant working conditions.
By intelligently monitoring the door environment, the door opening can be adapted to the situation depending on which object is approaching the door: this promotes productivity, saves heating energy and increases working comfort.
Solution
Together with Bircher Smart Access (https://smartaccess.bircher.com/de/), we have developed Hyperion 3D: a stereo-based, intelligent image processing system that measures, classifies and tracks objects in the vicinity of industrial doors in three dimensions. By precisely monitoring the size, speed, direction of movement and type of objects, the gate can be automatically opened and closed at the right time and to the appropriate height for any passing vehicle or person.
To monitor both sides of a gate, two separate stereo sensors can be combined. When installed, the stereo sensors are self-calibrating within a few minutes, making installation plug & play.
Key technologies
Stereoscopic image processing ensures accurate, robust real-time and economical object detection in 3D.
Hyperion 3D integrates two synchronised CMOS cameras with fisheye optics to capture a large gate area, an embedded Linux computer with Bluetooth low-energy interface to communicate with the gate height sensor and configure the sensor via a mobile app, and an Ethernet interface to communicate with its auxiliary sensor on the other side of the gate for two-way gate monitoring.
Another key component is the stereo vision algorithm: it dynamically learns the 3D background space, detects the size, speed, direction and distance of approaching objects in real time, and uses machine learning to distinguish between cars, forklifts, trucks and people. The stereovision algorithm also hides environmental influences, e.g. strong light, shadows, rain or snowfall.
Special challenge
A special challenge in this project is the automated testing of all components (hardware, software, sensors) as well as the required gate behaviour in reality. With a special test setup and an extensive set of reference recordings, it was possible to ensure that the system works reliably.
Summary
In this joint development project, SCS contributed with the system design, development of the electro-optical hardware, embedded software, image processing and calibration software. The jointly developed Hyperion 3D stereoscopic sensor minimises the number, height and duration of industrial door openings and reduces the number of unwanted door openings due to cross-traffic masking. This enables customers to save significant amounts of energy and associated costs. Hyperion 3D has been commercially available since 2019.
