The hardest question in pedestrian detection is not which brand. It is whether the people on your floor can realistically be made to wear something. Most vendors answer by selling you whichever architecture they happen to make. SensorZone is unusual in publishing all three options with a plain statement of which site each one suits, and that framing is useful even if you buy elsewhere.
The three tiers
Tag-based proximity warning is the foundation: each worker wears a lightweight RFID tag, antennas on the machine detect it across a full 360 degrees, and zones are configurable from around a 1 m radius for an indoor forklift out to 10 m for larger plant. Tags are quoted as lasting beyond three years without recharging, and installation at under an hour per vehicle. The company’s stated fit is sites where everyone can be tagged.
Tag plus camera adds AI camera monitoring on top, so tagged workers and untagged visitors are both detected. SensorZone calls this the standard to aim for, and names mixed environments with visitors and contractors as the fit.
Camera only drops the wearables, using machine learning to spot people and vehicles, with colour-coded distance alerts, live streaming and video clips on demand.
Being told which product suits which site, rather than being sold the flagship by default, is a decent proxy for how a supplier will behave later.
The alert that reaches three people
When a tag enters a warning zone, three things happen at once. The operator gets a visual and audible alert in the cab. The worker feels their own tag vibrate. And a high-visibility beacon warns everyone else in the area.
That third channel is the one competitors most often lack. It turns a private warning between two parties into a public one, which matters in a busy yard where a third person may be the one who needs to stop walking. Events feed a cloud platform that produces heat maps and trend analysis, so the record accumulates into something a safety manager can act on.
The company reports more than 1,500 active sites across 17 countries and around 140 million safe working hours, and operates from Wimborne in the United Kingdom with a North American office in Ohio.
Where it fits
Sites that want to start with tags and keep the option to add cameras without changing supplier. Operations with a large permanent workforce and a manageable visitor flow, where tagging is realistic and the exceptions are few enough to handle with the hybrid tier later.
The short installation time also suits mixed or leased fleets, where a system that takes a truck out of service for a day is a harder internal sell.
Where it does not
Buying the tag-only tier for a site that plainly has untagged people on the floor is the mistake this catalogue makes easy, because the entry tier is the cheapest line on the page. Be honest at the quoting stage about who walks your floor, and price the hybrid if the honest answer is contractors and drivers.
If you have already concluded that tags are unworkable, a vendor whose whole product is vision will usually have the deeper camera capability, since that is where their engineering has gone.
Six alternatives worth quoting
ZoneSafe is the closest comparison, also British, also vibration-based, and also selling a camera layer alongside tags. It adds vehicle-activated signage, so shortlist it if fixed hazards matter as much as people. See our ZoneSafe review.
HIT-NOT detects through racking using magnetic fields, which no RFID system does as well, and is the better fit where blind corners are structural.
ELOKON ELOshield brings programmable zone geometry and automatic speed reduction, useful where an irregular aisle makes a simple radius wrong.
Blaxtair and Speedshield AiVA are the two camera-first systems to price against the hybrid tier. If you are going to end up paying for cameras anyway, compare them with suppliers whose cameras are the main product.
Claitec rounds out a European shortlist with a comparable pedestrian alert range.
What to verify
Ask for the detection zone measured on your own truck with a load on the forks, since antennas and steel interact. Ask what proportion of existing customers run the hybrid rather than tags alone, which tells you what the honest answer usually turns out to be. Ask how the beacon is powered and where it mounts. And confirm what happens to your heat map data if you leave.
Use the risk scorer to size the pilot and to send the same brief to every supplier here. Our pedestrian detection page sets out the underlying tag-versus-vision trade-off in full.
