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Excavator operators trained in VR before they touch the machine

United Tractors School

Client
United Tractors School
Role
designed & built by Simvra's founder
Industry
heavy equipment
Platforms
PC VR (Oculus Rift / HTC Vive)
Hardware
1 trainee station
Engine
Unreal Engine
Timeline
6 months
Services
design, development, optimization, deployment
Year
2019

New excavator operators and maintenance technicians learn on real machines, and that is slow and expensive. Every training hour is a machine out of service, fuel burned, and a person working next to hydraulics and moving steel.

Maintenance training runs into the same wall from the other side. A procedure like servicing the air filter takes only a minute to demonstrate, but giving an entire class enough hands-on repetitions is difficult when there is only one machine, one engine bay, and a long queue. So academies ration hands-on time, and trainees reach the seat, or the open engine bay, with fewer real repetitions than anyone wants.

The answer is to let every trainee run the whole procedure as many times as they need, before they touch the machine.

Simvra's founder designed and built a VR trainer for United Tractors School with two modes: driving the excavator, and maintaining it. The 2019 build ran on PC VR, the tethered Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets of its era, so a trainee could run the whole procedure without a simulator hall or a real machine tied up. The machine in the headset is built from the real excavator's geometry, giving trainees a familiar layout that matches the actual unit.

In maintenance mode, the trainee works a real service procedure step by step. The build shown in these captures is the air filter service: open the housing, wipe the cover clean, dust the element with compressed air, and mark the maintenance number before closing up. The trainee uses VR hand controllers to perform the procedure, and each step waits for the right action before the next one opens, so the trainee is guided through the sequence in order.

Gloved hand wipes the inside of the excavator air filter cover with a cloth.
wiping the air filter cover
Air compressor nozzle aimed at a dusty air filter element to blow it clean.
dusting the filter with compressed air
Gloved hand marks the maintenance number on the air filter cover service label.
marking the maintenance number

The trainer was deployed at United Tractors School in 2019, and has supported 200+ trainees through the program each year. That is the outcome we can stand behind: not a lab study, but a deployed training system used as part of a heavy-equipment academy's program for years.

Every one of those trainees can run the procedure until it is second nature, without taking a real machine out of service.

Technical notes

The excavator and its engine bay are built to the real machine's geometry and run in Unreal Engine.

The 2019 trainer ran on PC VR, the tethered Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets of its era, driven from a workstation. Holding a full excavator scene and an interactive engine bay at the frame rate those headsets required is the optimization work. The engagement covered design, development, optimization, and deployment.

Maintenance is authored as an ordered procedure. Each action has to happen in the right order before the next step opens, so a trainee is guided through the real sequence without skipping required steps.

Train your people before they touch your machine

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