Modelling and designing a low-cost high-fidelity mobile crane simulator

The interactive visual simulation is the integration of real-time computer graphics with multimodalities, such as acoustic display and force feedback, to create a realistic simulation scenario to the user. This paper presents a method to design an interactive visual simulation on a cluster of desktop computers for the mobile crane training. This mobile crane training simulation is a project sponsored by Employment and Vocational Training Administration, Council of Labor Affair, Executive Yuan, Taiwan, to build a low-cost yet effective vehicle for training and licensing. To achieve this goal, a set of locally networked PCs is employed to form a parallel computing environment for the mobile crane simulation. The most important issue of developing a high-fidelity interactive visual simulator is its integration system for communication and monitoring among functional modules. This paper presents a peer-to-peer architecture on a cluster of PCs to develop the required integration system for the mobile crane simulator. In addition, the developed integration system uses the push-and-pull model to seamlessly communicate the messages among distributed functional modules. This push-and-pull model effectively achieves the parallelism among the distributed functional modules of a mobile crane simulator. With the push-and-pull model on the peer-topeer architecture, we can easily achieve the modularity and reusability of the functional modules of the simulating system. The presented push-and-pull model satisfies four essential attributes for the parallel computing, which are concurrency, scalability, locality and modularity. Our experience also successfully verifies the effectiveness of the presented *Corresponding author. Tel.: +8862-6215656; fax: +8862-6209749. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J.-Y. Huang), [email protected] (C.-Y. Gau). 1071-5819/03/$ see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 1 0 7 1 5 8 1 9 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 1 2 9 5 simulator with the system response rate of 16 times per second which is larger than human acceptable perception rate as suggested by the human factors studies. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.