Leica Geosystems announces substantial safety awareness solution enhancements

(Heerbrugg, Switzerland, 12 October 2021) Leica Geosystems, part of Hexagon, today announced substantial enhancements to their modular safety awareness solutions the Leica iCON PA10 and PA80 for construction sites. After initially concentrating on pedestrians, the enhancements now include collision avoidance in hazardous conditions involving sensor-enabled machines, objects, and restriction zones.

Construction sites can be dangerous: heavy traffic, large equipment, poor visibility and blind spots all create the potential for accidents on site. “We all live through our senses”, says Brad Mullis, Product Manager for Personal Alert Systems at Leica Geosystems. “We know what it means to see, hear or feel rain and then change our behaviour to dress or drive differently. But those are our actions. What about the rain? What if the rain would feel differently in our presence? What if our surrounding were aware of us?

Heavy construction consistently ranks in the top three industries worldwide for serious injuries and fatalities. Addressing these risks constituted the primary motivation behind the development of the Leica iCON safety awareness solution portfolio. The enhanced safety awareness technology from Leica Geosystems is helping to prevent incidents on construction sites. “We aim to provide solutions that protect assets and infrastructure but most importantly allow more people to always see their families after a hard day’s work,” concludes Mullis.

Committing to technology that integrates a collision-avoidance system with a personal alert solution might be the smartest investment a company can make to improve productivity and safety. Providing better visibility, greater feedback to operators and field personnel minimises the risk of injuries, near-misses and site shut-downs. For construction sites, safety awareness is a sound investment, ensuring that everyone gets home safely.

The Leica iCON PA10, is an accident-avoidance device worn on-site for 360-degree visibility of pedestrians around heavy equipment. The personal alert device creates multiple zones with up to 50 metres ranges with configurable warnings around any vehicle. The technology can predict potential close interactions between machinery and field crew, generating visual, audible and vibratory alarms to both operators and the pedestrians to avert potential accidents. Additional sensors can easily be installed on other moving objects and machines or to mark static infrastructure and avoidance zones. The resulting impact on blind spots and their human, operational and financial risks is significant. Safety awareness can thus become a keystone of how people, products and precious resources interact on successful construction sites.

Users of the popular Leica MC1 machine control platform can leverage their investments to run the new safety awareness solution. The Leica iCON PA80 integration will automatically alert the operator on the screen of the same device that they already use for their ongoing machine operations. This will increase awareness and immediate response regardless of if the operator is in a dozer, excavator or any other heavy equipment using the MC1 machine control system. Leveraging the MC1 cloud enablement, incidents can also be logged and distributed to enable visualisation, analytics or reporting within a contractor’s existing safety management processes.

“With alerting workers for possible hazards and at the same time capturing data of near-miss incidents, Leica Geosystems provide safety awareness technology to both protect workers and help in further risk management planning,” said Tommi Kauppinen, Chief Innovation Officer, machine control division at Leica Geosystems. “The Leica iCON PA10 and PA80 were developed with this specifically in mind. After several conversations and research on many jobsites, we took every precaution into consideration to develop this technology together with Hexagon Mining for collision avoidance and personal safety. It is exciting to see how our integrated platform MC1 is expanding to include more aspects of people, products, and precious materials to make construction projects more efficient, more productive and more safety aware.

Learn more about the solution here: https://leica-geosystems.com/products/machine-control-systems/awareness-solutions