Pilz Gmbh & Co Kg.

Ruediger Frank

Dietmar Doettling

Mark Hufnagel

Thomas Pilz

A method and device for safeguarding a hazardous working area includes a camera system for generating successive 3-D images of the working area, and an evaluation unit comprising a fail-safe foreign object detector, a classifier, a person tracker and a comparator. The foreign object detector generates a first signal comprising a first item of position information, representative of the position of a foreign object in the protection zone. The classifier attempts to identify the foreign object as a person. The person tracker tracks an identified person using a series of current 3-D images and, after each new 3-D image, determines a second item of position information representing the current position of the identified person. If the position of the foreign object according to the first item of position information and the position of the identified person are different from one another, a control signal for stopping the machine is generated.

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Ostfildern, Germany

Ruediger Frank