Forestry Crane Immersive User Interface for Control and Teleoperation

Abstract

Timber industry is one of the most relevant economic sectors in Estonia. Automatization of forestry management and harvesting processes optimization are realities also in this specific domain. As much as in other industrial fields adopting the Industry 4.0 paradigm and core technologies, forestry management, log harvesting and the wood processing industry make use of state-of-the-art sensors, Digital Twins and advanced interfaces for the operators. The latter include Extended Reality solutions and remote-control making use of immersive head mounted displays (HMD). This works presents an innovative system for hydraulic forestry crane teleoperation making use of HMD and wide-angle camera stream. The system hardware is installed locally while the software, integrated in Unity, supports the operator in using the crane’s native joysticks and controller for the log loading operations. Additional virtual user interface and controls are included in the immersive view and accessible through the same controls and joysticks.