Design of freely configurable safety light curtain using hemispherical mirrors

Safety light curtains provide reliable and cost‐effective protection against access into hazardous points or areas. However, in practice, peopl still need to adjust the light detection element accurately in order to receive the safe amount of irradiating laser light. In our proposed system, we utilized light emitting diodes (LEDs) as the light source, and designed two hemispherical mirrors to receive the LED light, and used PSoC microcomputer to determine the threshold voltage value. Compared with recent market products, the proposed system is freely configurable, and with no dead zone detection. In addition, compared to the laser light, the LED light has the advantages of no radiation, small electropult, low‐cost, and high efficiency. After conducting sufficient experiments, the proposed system has been found to successfully detect the intruder with 100% recognition rate, which can meet the needs of industrialization. © 2013 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.