Study on development of easy operating system for field robot in virtual reality environment

Hydraulic excavators are among the most versatile earthmoving equipment: these machines are used in civil engineering, hydraulic engineering, grading and landscaping, pipeline construction and mining. Especially, in flattening task, the excavator operator actuates the machine controls (joysticks, pedals and switches) in an organized form to achieve the desired straight motion. The actuation of these controls is a complex and not intuitive task, and therefore it requires long and costly training periods. Applying automation in these types of field robot is studied by several researchers. This paper proposes an easy operating system for field robot. This design lets each joystick perform independent horizontal and vertical motions of the end of bucket. The proposed method allows an user to control the excavator intuitively and operate complex motions smoothly with no constraints. For this, a virtual excavator scheme with a joystick control has been developed. Besides, the virtual reality interface is designed to allow the user be able to observe the motion of the attachment.