Applications / Safety
Machine Guard-State Monitoring
Detects when a machine guard, panel or interlocked door is missing, open or bypassed while the equipment is running, and logs the machine, zone and time.
See it in action
A guard open on a running line, flagged in seconds
Video slot — awaiting upload.
What it detects
This is an assurance layer over the machine’s own safety controls, not a substitute for them. It answers whether guarding is in the state the risk assessment assumed.
Missing machine guards
Identifies fixed guards absent from the machine they belong to, including guards removed for a changeover and never refitted.
Open guards and panels
Detects hinged guards, access panels and machine doors standing open while the equipment is in a running state.
Guard bypass and defeated interlocks
Surfaces the visible signatures of a defeated interlock — a guard held clear, a switch propped, a door taped — while the cycle continues.
Guard removal during operation
Flags a guard being taken off, or work being carried out on moving gear, rather than only reporting the resulting state.
Open cabinets and control panels
Detects electrical cabinets, control panels and enclosure doors left open around live equipment.
Machine envelope and pinch-point entry
Identifies a person or limb inside the machine envelope, pinch point or crushing zone while the machine is running.
Reaching into running equipment
Flags hands and arms entering feed openings, conveyors and rotating equipment during operation.
Unsafe conveyor interaction
Detects clearing, adjusting and reaching across conveyors and nip points without the line being stopped.
Robot and cobot cell door state
Monitors cell doors, light-curtain lines and access gates on robot and automated cells, alongside human-robot proximity.
Maintenance during operation
Surfaces maintenance activity taking place on equipment that has not been stopped, including work through a barrier or opened guard.
Barricade and barrier integrity
Flags missing, displaced or crossed physical barriers around equipment and temporary work zones.
Where it applies
Machine guarding is called out in the manufacturing, food & beverage, power-generation, chemical and automotive papers, generally alongside pinch-point and machine-envelope entry.
How it works
Edge inference on the cameras you already have
Guard-state inference runs on cameras covering the machine or cell. It reports on what is visible from outside the machine, and is designed to sit alongside — never in place of — interlocks, light curtains and the safety controller.
Zones, thresholds and schedules you configure
Set the reference guarded state per machine, the running-state signal it should be evaluated against, and the tolerance for changeover and maintenance windows so planned guard removal does not read as a violation.
Every event carries its own evidence
Each detection is logged with a timestamp, the camera and zone it came from, and a short clip. The record can be reviewed, exported or attached to an investigation without trawling through hours of footage.
Feeds the systems already in place
Events surface in Fogsphere Manager and route outward to the VMS, access-control platform, control-room wallboard, ticketing queue or messaging channel operators already watch.
Risk & control objective
The control objective is knowing whether guarding is actually in place, continuously, rather than at the moment of the last inspection. Guards are removed for a reason — a jam, a changeover, a quick adjustment — and the risk is not the removal but the not-refitting.
This is explicitly an assurance layer. The safety controller, interlocks and light curtains remain the control; Fogsphere gives the visibility that tells an engineering manager how often the machine ran with the guard open, on which line, on which shift.
That distinction changes what the data is for. A single open-guard event is an operational interruption. A pattern of open-guard events on one machine, one shift, one product changeover is a design problem — and it is the pattern that periodic inspection is structurally unable to see.
Related solutions
See how often your lines run with a guard open
We will show you guard-state monitoring on your own machines, including how changeover and maintenance windows are handled.