Influence of Restrictions on Range of View From Cockpit in Operation of Hydraulic Excavator

We investigated the effect of restricting the field of view from the cockpit on the operation of a hydraulic excavator. We developed a computer simulation for the turning operation of an excavator and we performed an experiment. In the experiment, we recorded the operation time required to complete various reaching tasks. We found that the operation time depends on the distance from the start position to the target position, target size, and the field-of-view width. We propose an extension to Fitts' law model to represent the operation time according to the operation's index of difficulty, which consists of the target distance, target size, and field-of-view width. The developed model was evaluated by the simulation results and the results obtained by an experiment with an actual hydraulic excavator. We observed significant improvement in the coefficient of determination between the operation time obtained by the experiments and the proposed index of difficulty.