Skilled humans have a tendency to fully engage all of their senses during a task. For example, human drivers use their entire field of vision at night even though headlights only illuminate tiny portions of their FoV. I've never operated an excavator, but I would be very surprised if skilled operators only used the portion of their vision immediately around the bucket and not the rest of it for situational awareness.
That said, UI design is a tradeoff. There's a paper that has a nice list of teleoperation design principles [0], which does talk about single windows as a positive. On the other hand, a common principle in older aviation HCI literature is the idea that nothing about the system UI should surprise the human. It's hard to maintain a good idea of the system state when you have it resizing windows automatically.
The hardest thing is going to be making really good autonomous safety layers. It's the most difficult part of building a fully autonomous system anyway. The main advantage of teleop is that you can [supposedly] sidestep having one.
It's like driving a Ford F150 without backup camera. You'd add the backup camera upfront, and not display the back view at the back window.
It's definitely challenging and we're far from something that's perfect. We're iterating towards something that's better everyday.
Yes that is precisely why - makes for a much more versatile machine. TB180FR - it’s med-small, about 10 ton.
Those workflow numbers come from multiple observations at different sites, one of the examples is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEsvu1CS64
I wish to talk to you because it's rare sight someone has a Takeuchi - is there a way to connect? My email is contact at useflywheel dot ai
I disagree and here's a couple of reasons why I say that:
1. What am I going to do with the time between releasing control and regaining it from the autonomous control?
2. In that break of workflow my first thought is it will cause a break in my concentration.
3. When I am swinging back from the truck to the trench the bucket is naturally in my control. It seems that in autonomy mode the transition from autonomous to my control would be very unnatural and choppy. I suppose with time it would be okay but man seems to violate the whole smooth is fast concept.
I'll shoot you an email.
It's been over a decade since I last operated an excavator, so grains of salt as usual - but I'd say it should be manual, or at least semi-automated. You need to take care where you unload the bucket on a truck, to avoid its weight distribution being off-center, or to keep various kinds of soil separated on the bed (e.g. we'd load the front with topsoil and fill the rear with the gravel or whatever else was below.
So if we are able to have really good autonomous safety layers to ensure safe movements, and dynamically resize remote teleop windows, you'd make the operator more efficient. So while we stream 360 degree view, we get creative in how we show it.
That's on the vision side. We also stream engine audio, and do haptic feedback.
Takeuchi are interesting! Rare ones to have blades even on bigger sizes - is that why you got one?