Shared Control of Mechanical Systems in Virtual Environments

In this master thesis a framework for control of mechanical systems is developed. The framework is extended with possibilities to simulate mechanical systems in a virtual environment. The virtual environment provides an easy way to experiment with high level control algorithms for mechanical systems and human machine interfaces. This work give a proposal on how the working cycle for an operator of a forwarder crane can be simplified with automated tasks and how shared control between the operator and the automated tasks can be implemented. To evaluate and test the automated tasks together with the shared control implementation a Valmet 830 forwarder is modeled in the virtual environment. The developed framework is an object oriented API (Application Programming Interface) written in C++ called atvs. The virtual environment extension is a dynamic real time simulation based on the AgX physics engine [1] and the OpenSceneGraph 3D graphics toolkit [2].