Human centered design of mobile machines by a virtual environment

Abstract

Psychomechatronics is a new holistic discipline that integrates mechatronics and cognitive science, offering innovative methods that lead to the concurrent design of human-machine systems. According to current methods, mechatronics features are designed first and human factors are considered thereafter. A problem with this approach is that it is often too late to impose significant changes in the mechatronics design at that time. Psychomechatronics, on the other hand, takes the nature of human cognition as the starting point of systems design and therefore it is a human-centered design principle. It does not adhere to the conventional sequential approach but applies simultaneously both mechatronics and cognitive science at the same conceptual stage, which optimizes the design of hybrid human-machine systems. The paper presents the key ideas of psychomechatronics design method with special reference to mobile machinery. The required virtual environment for carrying out the psychomechatronics design of mobile machines is described. The paper presents the results of applying usability test in a virtual environment for a sample mining machine. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.