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Operational Assistance System using 3-DOF Joystick with Reaction
Force Display to Load Transfer Machine in a Plane
Tomoya Kuneguchi
1
, Yoshiyuki Noda
1
, Yukinori Sago
2
and Kiyoaki Kakihara
3
1
Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, University of Yamanashi, Takeda 4-3-11, Kofu, Japan
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Japan
3
KER Co., Ltd, Toyokawa, Japan
Keywords:
Operational assistance, load transfer machine, 3-DOF Joystick, Reaction Force Display, Obstacles Avoidance.
Abstract:
This paper is concerned with an operational assistance system to a load transfer machine in a plane such
as a manually guided vehicle and a crane without vertical transfer. In the transfer machine, collisions with
obstacles are often occurred by the incorrect operations. Therefore, in order to avoid the obstacles to the
transfer machine, the operational assistance system using 3-DOF(3 Degree of Freedom) joystick with reaction
force display is proposed in this study. The 3-DOF joystick enables operator to manipulate the transfer machine
with back-and-forth, left-and-right, and rotation motions. And, it has motors for presenting the reaction force
on each axis. In this system, the joystick displays the reaction force which consists of the virtual elastic
force and viscosity resistance, which are controlled by PD control gains. By associating the gains in the PD
control with the distance between the obstacles and the transfer object, the joystick operation is constrained
for avoiding the obstacles. The effectiveness of the proposed operational assistance system is verified by the
experiments using the simulator of the transfer machine manipulated by the 3-DOF joystick.
1 INTRODUCTION
A load transfer machine such as a crane and an indus-
trial vehicle is widely used in industry. It is required
to transfer the load efficiently(Sawodny, Aschemann
and Lahres, 2002), (Osumi, Kubo, Yano and Saito,
2010). However, since there are some obstacles in
the transfer space, the operator has to manipulate the
transfer machine to avoid the obstacles. The skill is
required to manipulate the transfer machine. How-
ever, even if the skilled worker operates the transfer
machine, the collisions with the obstacles are often
occurred by the incorrect operation. 30 fatal accidents
by cranes occurred in Japan in 2011, of which fifteen
were the accidents by the incorrect operation(Japan
Crane Association, 2011). Including the unreported
accidents such as a near-miss accident, there are a lot
of accidents by the incorrect operation in the transfer
machines.
In order to operate safety the crane, some op-
erational assistance systems have been proposed in
the previous studies. The sway of the load in
the crane is occurred by the inappropriate opera-
tion. For suppressing the sway of the load, the op-
erational assistance system with the haptic device
was proposed(Yoneda, Arai, Fukuda and Miyata,
1999). The crane operation assistance system using
the augmented reality technology was proposed in the
study(Yi-Chen, Hung-Lin, Shin-Chung and Shang-
Hsien, 2011). In this system, the actual information
of the working environment and the virtual informa-
tion such as building information are integrated and
displayed on the monitor. However, the operational
assistance systems for avoiding the obstacles have not
been proposed in most previous studies as seen from
the above. In one of the previous studies, the oper-
ational assistance system for avoiding the obstacles
using the haptic joystick was proposed(Sato, Noda,
et.al., 2009). However, since the overall size of the
transfer object has not been considered in the sys-
tem, the collision of the obstacles and the edge of the
transfer object might be occurred. Moreover, the de-
sign method of the parameters in the joystick control
system are unclear in the paper. It is desired to de-
sign clearly the operational assistance system using
the haptic joystick with consideration of the overall
size of the transfer object for obstacles avoidance.
Recently, an omnidirectional mobile vehicle has
been developed as a next-generation personal vehi-
cle(Noda, Kawaguchi and Terashima, 2010). This
346
Kuneguchi T., Noda Y., Sago Y. and Kakihara K..
Operational Assistance System using 3-DOF Joystick with Reaction Force Display to Load Transfer Machine in a Plane.
DOI: 10.5220/0005026303460352
In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO-2014), pages 346-352
ISBN: 978-989-758-040-6
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)