The Problem:

Collisions of trucks which are themselves overheight or carrying overheight cargo with bridges causes many millions of dollars in damage every year, and can cause significant injury or even deaths. The wide variation in bridge height and in vehicle dimensions makes this a challenging problem, as does the difficulty of assuring that a driver notices warnings of low bridges – or even knows the height of his own vehicle. While most drivers are attentive and aware of their vehicle’s characteristics, even a small minority can cause tremendous disruption of traffic and damage to public and private property.

Current technologies ranging from warning signs to beam-break overheight sensors, chains or rods at the maximum height, and others have various drawbacks, ranging from being ignored to false alarms or failure to detect overheight vehicles in various circumstances. Few if any address additional issues of over-width vehicles, which can also pose traffic problems.

IEM’s Wise Solution

IEM is developing the Intelligent Dimension Evaluation and Alert System (IDEAS) along two separate technology paths: smart high-speed low-power laser ranging scanners and smart video analysis based dimensioning. Considerable progress has been made in both areas, demonstrating a very high speed, low cost scanning system and an innovative, effective, and flexible multi-stereo based smart video dimensioning system. IEM is currently determining which approach offers the greatest promise.