A Low-Cost Solution For Excavator Simulation With Realistic Visual Effect

A low-cost excavator simulator has been developed in this paper for training human operators and evaluating control strategies for heavy-duty hydraulic machines. In such a system, the operator controls a virtual excavator by means of a joystick while experiencing realistic operating feelings through force feedback, graphical displays, and sound effects in virtual operating environments. A GPU (graphics processing unit)-based, terrain-rendering methodology is adopted to create a realistic visual appearance of different operation regions on terrain such as excavated areas and dumped soil during the excavator simulation. The kinematic relationships of the excavator's rotary joints are described, and the 3D coordinate of the bucket tip are calculated as the basis of a dynamic interaction between the excavator and the virtual terrain. A simplified mathematical model of the excavator's digging volume is proposed, and a surface of excavated soil is constructed using the Bezier patch and is deformed by manipulating its control points along a pre-defined path so as to provide visually meaningful soil bucket interaction information to the simulator.