Electronic Badges and Forklift Awareness Zones Reshaping the Safety Bubble When Trucks Pass in an Aisle

This application covers a system that lets a forklift or similar industrial vehicle change the size and shape of the safety zone it maintains around itself, based on criteria sent from a remote server and on signals from electronic badges worn by people and fitted to other vehicles nearby. The applicant is Crown Equipment Corporation, one of the world’s larger manufacturers of forklift trucks.

The Problem

Warehouse safety systems commonly give a powered industrial vehicle an awareness zone, a virtual bubble around the truck. When something enters that bubble, the vehicle slows, warns the operator, or both. The approach works well in open floor space, but it runs into trouble in a narrow aisle.

Two trucks passing each other in an aisle will each sit inside the other’s awareness zone for the whole length of the manoeuvre. If the system responds the way it would to an unexpected pedestrian, both vehicles slow to a crawl, alarms sound, and the operators learn to treat the warnings as background noise. That is the worst outcome a safety system can produce, because desensitised operators stop reacting to the alerts that matter. The engineering problem is to distinguish a routine, expected passing manoeuvre between two vehicles from a genuine hazard, and to do it without simply switching the protection off.

What This Invention Does

The system puts a badge communicator on the industrial vehicle. It talks to electronic badges carried by pedestrians and fitted to other vehicles that come within range. A controller on the vehicle, coupled to memory and running program code, receives predetermined criteria from a remote server through a transceiver on the vehicle. Those criteria describe when and how to modify the size or the shape of the awareness zone.

The controller then compares what the badge communicator is hearing against those criteria. When the situation matches an aisle passing manoeuvre, the awareness zone is reshaped rather than simply triggering the standard response, so the vehicles can pass at a sensible speed while the protection around the rest of the truck remains in place. Because the criteria come down from a server rather than being fixed in the vehicle, a site can tune the behaviour to its own aisle widths, traffic patterns and rules, and update the whole fleet without touching each truck individually.

Key Features

• Badge communicator on the vehicle. An onboard communicator detects electronic badges within range of the industrial vehicle.
• Server-supplied criteria. Predetermined criteria that govern zone modification are received from a remote server through an onboard transceiver.
• Adjustable zone size. The awareness zone around the vehicle can be made larger or smaller in response to those criteria.
• Adjustable zone shape. The geometry of the zone can be reshaped, not just scaled, which is what makes aisle passing workable.
• Vehicle-to-vehicle recognition. Badges fitted to other vehicles allow the system to distinguish another truck from a pedestrian.
• Fleet-wide configuration. Because criteria are distributed from a server, behaviour can be tuned per site and updated centrally.

Who Is Behind It

The applicant is Crown Equipment Corporation, a family-owned manufacturer headquartered in New Bremen, Ohio, that builds electric lift trucks and the fleet management systems that go with them, including its InfoLink operator and fleet management platform. The named inventors are Juergen Buchmann, Andreas Simon and Lewis H. Manci. The application is a divisional of Australian application 2023237083.

Why It Matters

Powered industrial trucks are a persistent source of serious workplace injury, and the hazard is not usually the truck striking a wall. It is the interaction between vehicles and people sharing the same floor. Regulators including the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration treat powered industrial truck operation as a distinct area of duty, and Australian operators work under equivalent state work health and safety obligations.

The specific contribution here is behavioural rather than purely technical. Proximity detection has existed on warehouse equipment for years, using ultra-wideband radio, lidar and other sensing. The recurring failure mode is nuisance alerting, where a system that cannot tell a routine situation from a dangerous one trains operators to ignore it. A zone that changes shape according to context, using badge identity to know what it is actually looking at, is aimed squarely at keeping the alerts meaningful.

Related Concepts

• Forklift – the class of industrial vehicle this system is fitted to.
• Real-time locating system – the badge and tag technology used to track people and equipment indoors.
• Ultra-wideband – a short-range radio technique widely used for precise proximity detection.
• Occupational safety and health – the regulatory field driving these systems.
• Warehouse management system – the wider software layer that fleet criteria are distributed from.
• OSHA powered industrial trucks guidance – the United States regulator’s material on lift truck safety.

---

AU 2026202047 was published in the Australian Official Journal of Patents on 9 April 2026 and is open for public inspection. Patent applications represent inventions that are sought to be protected and do not necessarily reflect commercially available products.