Förstärkt verklighet på underjordiska gruvmaskiner

Sammanfattning: Underground mining has for a long time been associated with an extremely dangerous professiondue to the nature of the work and the environment. Large efforts have been made to makemachines autonomous but there are situations and environments where manual operations areneeded. Teleoperation provides operators with the ability to supervise and operate the vehiclesin the mines from a remote location through visual and sensory feedback, immensely improvingtheir health and safety conditions. However, operators usually experience a decrease in vehicleto-environment awareness while operating remotely in opposition to operating on-board.Augmented reality has shown to be a great tool in many areas of application through its abilityto help users perform tasks through visualizing and displaying virtual information in real-time,in the real environment. This thesis was divided into two parts. The first part investigated themachine’s sensor capabilities to apply tracking technologies for augmented reality. As well asrelated studies on other implementations and systems that used and applied augmented reality.The second part investigated the Epiroc module’s hardware performance in regards to what anaugmented reality system requires, and evaluated the module’s processor performance througha system simulation test.In terms of applying augmented reality, the machine sensors provided the system with a greatplatform for a large range of applications and the ability to apply a variety of tracking technologiesto track the position and orientation of the operator’s view. The results from the investigationimplied that the Epiroc module lacks sufficient processing power to be able to provide the userwith a desired frame rate while applying augmented reality, without compromising other aspects.To overcome the module limitations, a proposal was made to implement a dedicated augmentedreality system that utilizes Epiroc’s network infrastructure.