Cell guarding protects the space around a machine. Forge protects the place where the work actually happens — the blade, the press, the cutting head, and the hands that have to go near it. A breach of the unsafe zone stops the machine; and in the same pass it judges whether the gloves were on, how close the hand came, and what happened in the seconds either side.
The stop comes from a verified breach of an unsafe zone, and only from that. A hand, arm or glove crossing into a zone marked unsafe sets the NG verdict, and the NG verdict is what reaches the controller.
Prediction and proximity never do. They warn a supervisor that a hand is heading somewhere it should not, and they are deliberately kept out of the stop path: a prediction is a guess about the future, and a guess must never be the thing standing between a worker and a hazard. The same applies to PPE, ergonomics, sequence and man-down — those are judged, flagged and recorded, not enforced by bringing the line down. Risk that comes from a person being inside the cell at all, rather than at the tool, belongs to Monolith.
Every plant has a method statement. Forge is about the distance between that document and what happens at 3am on the night shift — measured continuously, per operator zone, with the evidence attached to every finding and the machine stopped when a zone is actually breached.
Gloved and un-gloved hands, plus helmet, vest and the rest of the PPE set, classified per zone against that zone’s own policy — a bare hand may be fine at the bench and a violation at the press. The glove model was chosen by testing candidates against real gloved-hand imagery rather than trusting a datasheet; the one that held up is the one that ships.
Unlimited zones per camera in five shapes — rectangle, square, circle, ellipse, polygon — each tagged safe or unsafe, each carrying its own PPE rules. Geometry is stored resolution-independently, so a layout drawn on one stream lines up on another without redrawing.
How much room is actually left between a hand and a zone it should not enter — measured outline to outline, not centre to centre, because a centroid distance ignores both the size of the hand and which part of the boundary is really nearest. Reports the gap, the rate it is closing, and time to contact. Give it one calibration figure and every readout switches from percentages to millimetres.
Each hand is tracked, its recent path fitted, and its trajectory run forward over a short horizon. If a predicted path reaches an unsafe zone, Forge says which zone and how far ahead — while there is still time to say something. Strictly advisory, and never shown in place of an actual breach.
No classifier is a guarantee. Alongside the trained models, Forge runs layers that do not care what entered the zone, only that something did — one that adapts to a scene which drifts, one that holds a reference image of the empty cell so an object left behind stays flagged instead of fading into the background. They cannot be defeated by glove colour, skin tone or an unfamiliar object.
Every violation can write a crop of the breached zone from the clean frame, a full frame with the overlay burnt in, and a clip that covers the run-up and the aftermath, not just the instant. Named and timestamped on write. Usable in a toolbox talk, an investigation, or as training data for the next model.
Built on the same models already running for zone work, so these cost frame time rather than new hardware.
Recognises a collapsed or motionless posture and raises an alert, including on an unmanned shift when there is nobody to notice.
Flags the postures that cost you people slowly rather than suddenly — sustained reaching, bending and twisting, summarised per zone over a shift.
Checks that the steps of a task happen in the order the method statement specifies, and flags the cycle where one was skipped.
Where hands actually go, accumulated over a shift and scoped to the whole frame, to all zones, or to the specific zones you pick. Exports as an image and as the raw grid.
An opt-in, privacy-gated module that distinguishes authorized from unauthorized personnel for a cell and flags entry by untrained staff. Consent-based, with an anonymised mode, and off by default.
Reads and writes plant controller tags for commissioning and for driving an indicator or an andon light from a verdict. Sessions are opened, used and closed rather than held, so Forge does not sit on a controller’s limited connection budget.
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