BELTON, Mo. — Safe Fleet will unveil its intelligent safety solutions at the upcoming National Association for Pupil Transportation (NAPT) trade show in Kansas City, Missouri, on Oct. 30.

Safe Fleet will also exhibit its core school bus safety solutions, such as video surveillance, including the TH8, Seon’s new 8-channel Hybrid HD DVR, as well as routing software, such as the new Seon Path Route Operations Software, stop arms, crossing gates, and roof hatches.

“We’ve been trying to tackle the critical issue of school bus perimeter safety as an industry for years,” said Chris Akiyama, vice president of the school bus division at Safe Fleet. “Stop arms, crossing gates, and cameras have each helped to reduce the number of fatal injuries and improve safety, but to get the number of children killed in school transportation-related crashes over the next decade moving towards zero, we need to do more.”

Akiyama added that Safe Fleet is “adding intelligence to existing traditional safety products as well as video, sensors, and means of notification to actively engage with the driver, students, and pedestrians when a potential hazard is identified.”

Here are the first of Safe Fleet’s intelligent perimeter safety solutions, which will be available to the school bus market in early 2019.

Predictive Stop Arm

This solution monitors approaching traffic and makes use of radar technology and artificial intelligence to analyze when a stop-arm violation is likely to happen. The school bus driver is notified with a visual and audible alarm, and affected students are warned it might not be safe to cross with a spoken word alert projected from external speakers.

Advanced Danger Zone Protection

This solution focuses on the areas that present the most risk to students — the front, right-hand side, and rear of the bus. Making use of predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, the solution detects people and their movement, including speed, direction, and trajectory and predicts if risk is probable as it relates to the bus. The system then provides an audible alert to the bus driver.

Around Vehicle Monitoring with Active Alerts

This solution monitors the entire perimeter of a school bus, making use of motion detection to actively alert the driver of the possible hazard. The affected zone is displayed in an onboard monitor and is accompanied with an audible alert to spur action.