Design Challenge - September 2009

MIKE TURNER

 

To tackle a blue-sky brief such as this I wanted to introduce thinking from outside the off-highway industry, so that I could potentially rip up the rulebook entirely – approaching the challenge without any established preconceptions.
With this in mind, I teamed up with a talented undergraduate from Coventry University – Peter Spriggs – whose work has already caught the attention of Land Rover’s design team. I asked Peter to consider the exterior of the machine, in response to ideas we discussed and developed jointly for the interior interface.

Our influences for this proposal were therefore incredibly far-reaching, drawing on ideas and concepts from films, emerging and existing technologies, games design and web-based interfaces.

Behind it all was an underlying feeling that this was design for the operator in its purest sense – but based on an entirely 21st-century perspective. We didn’t want to follow any existing conventions and precedents for machine interface design. Our self-set brief was therefore surprisingly straightforward: make the machine entirely operator-centric, and envisage a machine interface that is wholly tailored to the operator – without compromise.

Anthropometric diversity

Our first realisation was that most existing controls and interfaces are descended from very basic mechanical linkages and levers – solutions that have been around since the dawn of the industrial age, that are defined by what was mechanically feasible and repeatable in industry, rather than what necessarily felt comfortable or natural for each operator to use.

To an industrial designer, one of the key challenges in vehicle design is to successfully accommodate the ergonomic diversity of the global operator market. Cab interiors are growing ever more complex in pursuit of this goal, seeking to accommodate the 5th percentile Japanese female in the same context as the 95th percentile Dutch male.

Controls are now therefore located on additional levers and linkages: extending sliders – adjustments for reach, rake, posture, recline, lumbar, height, seat index point and sightline. These solutions often add cost and complexity to the design, and seldom completely satisfy the full range of operators.

However, this cannot be seen as a design failing – it’s an open acknowledgement of just how incredibly hard it is to fit a quart into a pint pot and vice versa. Add to this the dexterity, ability and straightforward ergonomic preferences of each individual, and it could be argued that the task is becoming impossibly complicated.

Background research

Working outwards from the operator into machine space, I realised that the position and even size of each control interface ideally needed to be configurable and instantly adjustable in its position and orientation. Trying to do this with physical components just wasn’t feasible – the extent of variation was just too great to successfully accommodate through linkages, levers and adjustment mechanisms.

I began to think about how interface design on computers is evolving. Thirty years ago the interface was a command prompt line of text on the screen interfaced via a typewriter-style keyboard. This slowly evolved into the Windows-style graphical user interface (GUI) where system structures, groupings and relationships were represented visually, and could be reconfigured by dragging and dropping via a mouse on screen.

Nowadays touch-screen phones are regarded as commonplace. Physical keypads are no longer required, and the user can slide unwanted features out of the way, grow or reduce the scale of each submenu, reconfigure the look and feel of the device to suit specific tasks, scenarios or daily preferences – all through gesture-based interfacing.

Through my own work in industry, I’m becoming increasingly familiar with virtual representation of developing machine designs: 3D glasses, digital projection and immersive caves – virtual spaces in which you can analyse and compare many aspects of the design and interact with it, without ever needing to cut metal or wait for a prototype. These digital environments enable design teams to make decisions quickly and effectively – changing the physical architecture of the product effortlessly and instantly if required.

It struck me that you could conceivably develop a virtual interface for the machine, which by its very nature would be easy to reconfigure and adapt to suit anthropometric diversity, operator dexterity, experience, personal preference and machine context. It would be an interface wholly tailored to the individual.

Gesture-based virtual control system

I explored the idea of having no physical controls as such, just operator hand gestures effective within a localised field generator. My system works in conjunction with a 3D projected image of the field space. The hand interacts with icons and menus in much the same way as a touch-screen, pushing, sliding, rotating, growing and twisting them as required. Each icon relates to specific functions of the machine.

The operator wears a coded glove and moves his hand within the field. The machine tracks the motion of these gestures and translates them into the machine. The technique is along the lines of motion capture used in the film industry to animate characters – but working in real time.

In doing so, the gestures, icons and menus can conceivably be entirely operator-specific. The interior can be wholly configurable to suit each operator’s preferences, including personal and regional requirements such as language, ambient lighting and temperature conditions. The operator can additionally develop and assign specific gestures and shortcuts for repetitive machine tasks. All this information can be uploaded and transferred to the machine as a preference data file via USB – or simply encoded into each glove.

Cab interior design

Within the cab the operator is free to move his head, arms, feet and hips as required, but is supported by the machine so he is stable and can’t make any involuntary movements that can be misinterpreted by the machine.

To achieve this, the operator’s torso is suspended upright in a compliant membrane – which moulds itself to the operator’s back like an F1-style tub – that includes sensors to receive signals from shoulder flex and hip swing, which are used to control the slew frame. In addition, pressure pads in the floor receive signals from the feet, which govern track speed and direction – similar to the control plate used on the Segway two-wheeled bike.

A series of interactive floating projected spheres exist within the cab space, which triangulate to the operator and adjust their position based on operator height and preference. Primary spheres are accessed to dictate machine movement, and secondary spheres govern all the incidental functions – interior and exterior worklights, air-con settings, communications channels, etc.
When his hands are inside the field-generated spheres, the operator can operate controls, open submenus, etc. When the hand is pulled out of the spheres, hand actions aren’t counted.

Learning the machine

In an inactive mode, the vehicle becomes a trainer simulator – projecting a ‘fake’ virtual view of the vehicle and surrounding terrain onto the glass of the cab. This enables newcomers to quickly learn and develop the correct gestures to pilot the machine properly. The machine is also intelligent enough to learn and adapt itself to the specific gestures and mannerisms of new pilots.

Perhaps as a start-up subroutine of the machine at the start of each shift, the operator could interact with the machine to perform a series of quick tests and checks to ensure everything is calibrated correctly.

Exterior

We wanted to go for something that looked fitting for a construction environment – rugged, tough, powerful – but that also kept in mind the theme of the machine being based around the operator and an overall aesthetically pleasing design. With that in mind, we decided on a track-based layout to give it a definite grounding. This seemed the best choice for the manoeuvrability as well, as we would have to go with skid steering to minimise width.

The design is dominated by the two large jointed arms with grapple claws for taking hold of any object regardless of its shape. The central cab completes the humanoid form and the shape of the bodywork echoes the operator within, creating a visor-style windscreen and a body that curves around the shoulders to the back. The ballast keeping the weight central while lifting heavy objects slides out from the rear where it fits snugly within the bodywork.

To increase the machine’s adaptability the grapple hands can be replaced with several attachments needed for different tasks, such as logging equipment, a large heavy-duty bucket or hoses and a tank for firefighting.

Summary

Perhaps the most mentally challenging Design Challenge yet! The nature of our specific approach meant that this one was tackled more as a thought exercise than an industrial design CAD modelling assignment. The ideas and concepts put forward are definitely about as far ‘out there’ as we could conceivably go. As such, it may be seen as being a bit too removed from the existing world of machine and interface design.

However, having enjoyed recent concepts from Volvo (which showcased head-up displays in the Fenix Paver) and Doosan (which demonstrated a 1.5-tonne I-hand excavator concept at ConExpo, piloted remotely via a control glove) it’s clear that there are key players within the off-highway industry who are already thinking along these lines.

Acknowledgements

I’d specifically like to thank Peter Spriggs for his collaborative support on this project, leading the CAD design and renders of the vehicle exterior while providing a useful sounding board for the interior concept.

To find out more about Peter’s work, go to http://ps-designfolio.blogspot.com or email him at charger.68@hotmail.co.uk

More images from Mike Turner

* Click on a thumbnail below to view a larger image.

 

 

 

 

Biography

 

Mike Turner has been a professional industrial designer since graduating from Coventry University in 1996.

From the beginning of his career, he has been actively involved in and inspired by off-highway vehicle design projects, working with construction and groundcare companies on active projects even as an undergraduate.

He was senior industrial designer at JCB for more than five years, working as part of its in-house team responsible for the design development of all cosmetically sensitive exterior and interior components.

He left in 2007 to set up his own business, Mike Turner Design Limited, working as a 3D CAD-based industrial design freelancer.

Contact details:

Email: mike@miketurnerdesign.com
Web: www.miketurnerdesign.com
Tel: 07918 053474