The Effects Of Virtual Annotations On Construction Equipment Teleoperation Performance

With the rapid development of Chinese economy,the challenges caused by the hazardous or extreme environments are increasing with the booming construction project types.Traditional construction methods inevitably expose construction equipment operations to dangers on-site.Teleoperation of construction equipment is a promising solution when the site environment is dangerous to an operator.However,limited situational awareness of the operator,especially under adverse visual conditions,impedes the implementation of construction equipment teleoperation.As an intuitive form of information presentation,Virtual Annotation(VA)has a great potential to improve operators’ situational awareness.Thus,it is of great theoretical and practical value to explore the effects of Virtual Annotation on construction equipment teleoperation performance.In order to investigate how operators respond to VA,this paper first reviewed the effects of some factors affecting the VA reading and understanding during teleoperation,including human attention,cognitive load,SpA and VA design.For a further quantitative analysis,UML was used to model for the requirement analysis and design of the experiment system,which was then developed via Unity3D.In the following experiment,all the subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental group(with VA)and control group(without VA)and completed the experiment.Finally,the performance of the two groups were compared to analyze and discuss the effects of VA.The results demonstrate that the experimental group made significantly fewer collisions under the adverse visual condition,especially the collisions on the right side of the cabin.But some negative effects were also observed,such as increased time of completion and a trend of increased collision numbers on the back of the equipment.It indicates that properly-designed VAs can help operators efficiently integrate and understand information from different visual sources and thus avoid more collisions under adverse visual condition.The negative effects are speculated to be caused by the mechanism of forming a base view and an increasing VA-related cognitive load.Due to little existing research to support these speculations,more should be conducted to give explanations.