Stop blind spot and reversing accidents at the loading dock
A camera at each dock watches a defined zone. The moment someone enters it, a signal head in the driver's line of sight turns red and a hooter sounds, and it holds red until the zone is clear for ten seconds. It reduces the risk of blind-spot and early-departure incidents without a vehicle restraint.
What this looks like on your dock
Five things every EHS manager and plant head recognises. None of them is a failure of effort.
The driver at your dock today is not the driver from yesterday.
Induction, briefing and signage all assume the same person comes back tomorrow. With contractor fleets, they never do. The control has to live in the environment, because it cannot live in the person.
The control stays at the dock. It does not change shift.
Six docks live at once. Supervision can stand in one of them.
Your team can be excellent and still not be in six places at the same time. Add shift change, breaks and the night shift, and the gaps are structural. Concurrency is geometry, not effort.
One camera and one signal head at every bay, on every shift.
The near-miss that never reached a report.
Dock events involving contractor vehicles are the least reported on any site, because reporting one creates work for the site and the transporter both. So dock risk reads smaller in the group numbers than it actually is.
Every detection, signal state and hooter trigger logged automatically.
By the time the investigation starts, the vehicle has left the gate.
The driver works for another company and is three states away. What remains is recollection, not record, in front of a regulator, an insurer and a customer auditor.
A timestamped, video-clipped record of the event, before anyone asks for it.
"Refresher training conducted. Signage displayed."
Every EHS manager has written that corrective action knowing exactly how an auditor will read it. Not for want of effort. For want of an engineered control to write instead.
An engineered control you can name in the corrective action.Five states, in the driver's line of sight
A camera watches the region of interest for that bay. The signal head sits where the driver sees it in the mirror. The hooter is heard by the driver and the person on the floor at the same instant.
The system detects and signals. It does not brake the vehicle · the truck stops because the driver has a clear instruction in their line of sight and a hooter that both the cab and the floor team can hear.
Red, with hooter
A person enters the region of interest, or loading is in progress. The driver is told to hold; the floor is told someone is in the path.
Amber, ten seconds
The zone reads clear. The head holds amber for a ten-second cooling period, because stepping out briefly is not the same as work being finished.
Green
The cooling period completes with the zone still clear. The driver now has a positive signal rather than an absence of one.
Snap back to red
Anyone re-entering returns the head to red immediately, hooter included. No delay, and no manual reset for the floor team to remember.
Red, held
Once the trailer is on the bay and work has started, the head holds red until loading is signed off. This is the control against a premature departure: the driver is never guessing whether the trailer is clear.
Already running at customer docks
That sequence is not a concept. It is installed, commissioned and logging events every shift.
Prediction accuracy is a VijAI platform figure across all modules. Incident reduction, deployed sites and unsafe acts detected are measured across VijAI industrial deployments as a whole, not dock installations alone. The dock-specific numbers on this page are the single-site figures below, and they are labelled as such.
| Measured at one site | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Unsafe reversal events logged per month | 28 | 2 |
| Near-miss reports per month | 52 | 7 |
| Spotter cost per month | ₹1.8 L | ₹60 K |
| Client safety audit score | 72% | 96% |
These are one site’s numbers over one 90-day window, not a product-wide claim. Ask us for a reference call with the site rather than taking the table on trust.
“We had no major accident. Yet. But every operations head knows the night shift is where the risk sits, and we could not keep three spotters on every bay. It gave us cover on cameras we already had, and it stopped an unsafe reversal in the first two days.”Head of EHS · 3PL operator, western India logistics hub · anonymised
Ten things running at every bay
SDRS is the dock layer of DriveAI, the VijAI vehicle-safety module. This is what ships, exactly as it ships.
Person-in-zone detection
A camera at each dock entrance watches for people entering the bay while work is under way.
Configurable region of interest
The zone is drawn per dock by vehicle class, approach geometry and site policy. Two bays can differ. For fixed restricted areas away from the dock, see ZoneAI restricted-zone monitoring.
Active signal head
Red, amber and green in the driver's line of sight, so the state of the bay is never a guess.
Hooter alert
Audible at the same instant for the driver and the person on the floor, because neither can see the other.
On-site edge processing
The AI runs on an edge server at the plant. Video is processed locally and does not leave your network.
Wireless comms
Camera, signal head and hooter link to the edge server over WiFi. No control cabling to run at the bay.
Solar signal head
Panel and battery on the post. No mains run to the signal, so the install stays out of the civil scope.
Audit-grade event log
Every detection, signal state, hooter trigger and dwell duration, timestamped and video-clipped.
Three deployment modes
On-premise, hybrid or cloud, so the rollout fits your OT policy rather than fighting it.
Made in India
Designed, built and supported by VB Group® in India. Spares, engineers and escalation are local, not a ticket queue in another time zone.
What a restraint does, and what it does not
Most warehouse docks have no vehicle restraint fitted, and will not retrofit one on every bay. Retrofitting means civil work at the pit and power at each bay, mixed fleets arrive with underrun bars at different heights, and the spend has to be justified bay by bay against production capex. OSHA’s loading dock guidance sets out the same hazard set.
| Capability | Vehicle restraint | Detection with signalling |
|---|---|---|
| Physically holds the trailer | Yes | No |
| Works with nobody watching | Yes | Yes |
| Addresses trailer creep | Yes | No |
| Covers the blind zone continuously | No | Yes |
| Tells the driver why he is held | No | Yes |
| Alerts the person on the floor | No | Yes |
| Needs civil work and power at each bay | Yes | No |
| Depends on a compatible underrun bar | Yes | No |
| Produces a timestamped, video-clipped record | No | Yes |
Where both are present they complement each other. Where a restraint is not going to be installed, signalling is the control that can be.
What this does not do
Stated plainly, because an EHS professional will find these out on the site walk anyway and it is better that we say them first.
- It is not a physical barrier. If a driver moves against a red signal, nothing holds the trailer. Signalling changes the information he acts on.
- It does not address trailer creep. Gradual movement of the trailer under forklift loading is a mechanical problem that needs a mechanical control.
- Interlock integration is roadmap. Tying the signal to a dock leveller, chock or restraint is partner-dependent and site-dependent, and quoted only where contracted.
- It needs a mains point per dock. The signal head and hooter are solar, but the camera's PoE injector runs on mains. A site survey confirms this bay by bay.
Three ways to run it
The AI runs on the on-site edge server in all three. What changes is where the reporting lives and what leaves your network.
Nothing leaves the site
Fully local. Edge AI only, no internet dependency, no SMS or email alerts, no cloud. The choice where OT policy does not permit an external connection.
Local processing, alerts out
Edge AI on site with SMS and email alerts over your own network. Video stays local. The usual industrial preference, and the one most sites settle on.
Managed, multi-site
Edge AI on site, with reporting and the full administration console on the VijAI cloud. Suited to groups that need one view across several plants.
Internet connectivity for hybrid and cloud deployments is in the customer's scope.