Virtual Environment for Teleoperation of Forwarder Crane

At the research center IFOR (Intelligenta Fordon Off-Road), one long-term goal is the development of fully autonomous forest machines. Some of the driving objectives are to increase productivity and to improve the working environment for the operator. The development of teleoperated vehicles is one step in this direction, it is however still facing a number of challenges. This thesis examines how virtual environment technology can be used to address some of these challenges. Furthermore, it describes the development of an application prototype that adds virtual environment support to a crane teleoperation system. The software includes a scene graph based visualization of a crane model that reflects the configuration of the physical crane by responding to sensor data. The application allows for supervisory control of the crane over the Internet, by letting the user specify a target position or path for the crane tip. It also supports a dynamic environment, where an environment sensing system can be used to add objects. Although no reliable environment sensor system exists today, an introduction of such a system would give the virtual environment solution several advantages compared to streaming video feedback.