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.