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Comparison
2026-07-02
8 min read

Edge AI vs Cloud AI for Forklift Safety

DHI Safety Operations
Edge AI Architecture
Reviewed by: DHI Engineering

Who this is for

For warehouse buyers deciding whether forklift safety detection should run locally or in a cloud analytics workflow.

The buyer question

Where should forklift-pedestrian safety inference run?

Forklift conflicts are timing problems

When a forklift and pedestrian path converge, the alert needs to arrive while behavior can still change. That makes the full camera-to-alert path more important than a lab model number.

Cloud can support review

Cloud analytics can be useful for reporting and fleet-level review. Live warnings, horns, local signals, or VMS alarms should be evaluated against local inference because the physical event is happening on site.

Pilot the round trip

Measure camera ingest, inference, event creation, VMS routing, signal activation, and acknowledgement during a real shift.

How to use this with DHI

Use this page as a pre-pilot checklist. Pick one zone, one event type, one alert owner, and one review cadence. If the current cameras cannot support the workflow, fix the camera plan before expanding the deployment.

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