Agricultural Machinery Field of View Simulation Using Ray Tracing for Early Stage of Design Optimization

The issue of the field of view of work vehicles is a topic that is still being discussed in the regulatory field. Although standards lay down minimum safety requirements and there are various arrangements such as manufacturers adopting cameras, or good practice requiring the site to be organized in advance or the presence of an external operator to coordinate the work, the issue remains topical and can be improved through the use of new technologies. This paper presents an innovative method that employs Ray Tracing-based rendering to virtually analyze and verify the operator's field of view as required by the current reference standards as well as for the new one, which will be based on earth-moving machinery standards. Through this approach, tasks involving the interaction between agricultural machinery and nearby workers can be simulated to assess the operator's visibility during such scenarios. Moreover, this tool allows for the identification of potential issues early in the 3D design phase, eliminating the need to build physical prototypes in order to increase the possibility of detecting people in the vicinity of the vehicle and to reduce or eliminate the risk of investment. In this way, the designer has the possibility to make the design optimization directly to the components that create masking effects or to opt for indirect vision systems, thus reducing machinery development times and costs. In this paper, numerical and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach used for field of view verification will be presented. Additionally, the limitations of the standard concerning the rectangular boundary visibility field (RB) will be discussed.