My name is Will, I am a final year product design student. I am showcasing my project APEC, a safety device that monitors humans operating around the PTO shaft on a tractor and will perform an emergency stop if necessary to prevent entanglement. Growing up on a farm in County Wicklow, I have always been aware of the dangers involved with farming. Over the past decade, there have been nineteen fatal accidents on Irish farms each year. This accounts for more than two in five of all workplace fatalities in Ireland within the same time frame. There are also four thousand five hundred non-fatal injuries on Irish farms each year, some of which result in life-changing and disabling injuries. Approximately fifty percent of these farm accidents involve a tractor. Protecting farmers in their workplace by reducing the risk of accidents involving PTO shafts is the motivation for this project.
The Power Take-Off (PTO) system is one of the most dangerous aspects involved in interacting with a tractor. The PTO system is used to power any machinery attached to the tractor that requires power. The APEC is designed to monitor a predefined exclusion zone around the PTO shaft, the device uses artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor the presence of humans and can trigger an alarm if a person is nearing the edge of the exclusion zone. It will then perform an emergency stop on the PTO system if a human enters the exclusion zone, preventing any entanglement and/or any serious injury from occurring.
The APEC creates a safer workspace for farmers without interfering with their workflow. The system is designed to operate the minute the tractor is turned on, requires no mandatory interaction with the user, and will only interrupt their workflow if necessary to prevent an accident from occurring.