Quantifying the control lever displacement of construction equipment via QR code detection

There is an increasing need to analyze the operational characteristics of construction equipment. Thus, it is important to closely extract each operating process of construction equipment. However, owing to the nature of construction equipment, it is difficult to extract all their movements because they have many joints and occluded areas. In this paper, we propose a system and method for quantifying the displacement of a control lever to sense the operating processes of construction equipment. Quick response (QR) codes were attached to the control lever and recognized by a camera to quantify the displacement of the control lever. This system has the advantages of easy installation and low cost because it only requires printed QR codes and an indoor camera. We verified that the position of the control lever is numerically reflected when the control lever moves from top to bottom using an electric forklift. We also confirmed that the displacement of the control lever is derived by performing actual forklift operations. Experimental videos quantifying the movement of the control lever as displacement can be viewed at: https://github.com/981boxster/qrQuantifier.