Heavy machinery such as hauling trucks, excavators or bucket-wheel excavators are a constant risk factor for workers or other personal or other machinery or vehicles on a mining worksite. Each year, thousands of accidents happen in the mining industry, whereby about three quarters of them involve some sort of mining equipment, most of them mining vehicles. Protective clothing can provide only a delimited protection as the forces effected by such heavy and often very huge machinery are enormous.
Whilst efforts are made to design mining vehicles with respect to better safety standards, these approaches are costly and especially limited as the basic functionalities of these apparatus always will pose a risk. On the other side, efforts are made by safety tutorials to instruct mining workers accordingly to better recognize and avoid risks. However, many situations happen in the field, where the risk a vehicle is posing is difficult to assess to a person as for example the vehicle's velocity and thus the risk resulting form the vehicle's movement is hard to evaluate correctly.
Assisting working personal by technical means for security reasons are known in the art. For example, document US 2013/182066 A1 discloses a device for surveying the surround of a working machine such as a hydraulic excavator to survey for the purpose of safety. Therein, it is suggested to provide the working vehicle with a plurality of cameras, monitoring risky zone as the backward of the machinery or other zones blind for the vehicle's operator. However, an operator may nevertheless overlook a person present in a risk zone or perceiving a person in the risk zone may occur to late to prevent injury or accident.
There is thus a need for a method and device to assist a person on a mining field in evaluating or recognizing in real time risk zones caused by mining vehicles of its surrounding, particularly with the objective of avoiding the person's entry in such a risk zone and/or warning him or the mining vehicle's operator in due time.