St. Petersburg (FL) Crane Collapse

[JStephen]

http://www.wtsp.com/article/news/lo...lamed-for-st-pete-crane-collapse/67-536008526

“We’re very fortunate the incident that happened yesterday didn’t affect the building, won’t affect the schedule, and most importantly no one was injured,” Byrne said. “It was just an unfortunate event that happened and the operator made an error lifting a piece of equipment. He got outside the safe zone of the equipment so this is a good opportunity to remind everyone to be diligent about every task they do so that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

 

[3DDave]

It highlights one of the greatest problems for full automation of such things - Take the example where a person is able to detect the change in pressure under their feet to realize they will soon topple over, but that requires tens of thousands of nerves to coordinate the whole picture. Even on simpler vehicles it seems like it's rare to non-existent to include a couple of strain gages and microprocessors to perform a similar task. In the case of a crawler like this it would be enormously expensive to make a similar measurement for ground pressure and to predict the rate of transfer one needs to integrate angle, extension, possibly wind speed, and load feedback as well. My amazement at what robotics accomplishes is because even complicated robots have fewer sensors that the smallest insects and are slightly better than the simplest worms.

 

[btrueblood]

I thought most construction cranes these days had such instruments to tell the operator if limits were being approached? I guess I'm thinking tower cranes, where I have knowledge from a colleague whose son trained to operate them. Guess a crawler crane might have more instrument requirements (angle of boom, rotation of deck, in addition to load sensing). Our shop electric forklift has sensors and relief valves that prevent lifting a load when the forks are not centered/are overtilted, or load is overweight.