Study On The Usability Design Of Cab Of Small Crawler Excavator

As per the design of excavator cabs,much effort has been devoted to the rational characteristics and solid structures,whereas researchers have paid little attention to the emotional aspects and appearance.In particular,lacking research on the ease of use has constrained further development of the excavator industry.To address this problem,the present thesis focuses on optimizing the design of the small crawler excavator cab,which combines perspectives of ergonomics,product semantics,and basic theories of ease of use,in order to establish an integrated design model and an evaluation model.The research objective is to improve the ease of cab operation as well as the comfort and work efficiency of cab operators/drivers.The main approaches adopted herein include literature review,market research,systematic method,questionnaire survey and interview method.The main research process and associated results are as follows.The thesis has summarized the state-of-the-art of domestic and international research work on ease-of-use design and excavator driving design,and has subsequently analyzed the urgent problems to be solved.The thesis then has proposed a usability design integration theoretical model combing ergonomics,product semantics and usability basics.Based on that,the thesis has carried out research on usability design process and application of a small crawler excavator driving cab.According to the six usability design requirements extracted from the proposed theoretical model,the thesis has conducted an analysis of the usability requirements of the research object.Among them,the operator's use requirements have been analyzed from the perspectives of human-machine interaction,function instruction,modeling,color,psychology and emotion,in order to render the design in better alignment with the operator's physiological and psychological expectations.Following that,the usability design simulation/application of the research object has been performed,with emphasis on its functional layout of operational area and the reasonable layout of display area.The final design outputs have been realized via engineering software platforms,such as Rhino and Keyshot.As per the evaluation of above-mentioned design,the thesis has constructed a multi-level usability evaluation model for assessing this design simulation,using CATIA software and comprehensive AHP fuzzy evaluation method.The comfort of human operations and visual field as well as ease of use has been considered.These results have verified that the proposed design of the small crawler excavator cab has readily improved the extent of ease of use and understanding.Moreover,according to the evaluation of this design simulation,thehuman-machine comfort and overall aspects have been graded,leading to a comprehensive evaluation of the ease-of-use design from the perspectives of cab operators.The research results of this master thesis show that the proposed integration theory and evaluation models of ease-of-use design shed light on the theoretical guidance and practical application for the design of small crawler excavator cabs.Such design is capable of not only improving the comfort and ease of operation,but also enhancing the ease of learning and understandability,which better cater to the psychological and emotional needs of cab operators.Moreover,the present design and associated methods can be extended and applicable to other construction machinery products,which would be of interest to a broader industry community.This paper has in total 70 figures,38 tables and 61 references.