Sensor Simulation for Autonomous Mining Vehicles

Sammanfattning

The mining industry uses vehicles for a wide range of applications, including excavation and transportation of rock and soil. Currently, this requires a lot of human labour, mainly drivers, but efforts are being made to increase automation, e.g. using autonomous vehicles. In order for a vehicle to reach any level of autonomy, it needs to be aware of its surroundings, for instance by using sensors. The placement of the sensors is a difficult problem. The goal of this project was to create a tool that would simplify the sensor placement process. The tool should simulate sensors on autonomous vehicles, both by visualizing their field of view and by generating synthetic data. The tool was created, including simulation environments, models of different types of sensors and tools to analyze the results of the simulation. Both the field of view visualization and the data analysis tools were shown to be powerful tools for evaluating sensor placements. All of the sensor models are able to generate data, with different levels of realism. The radar model and the camera model give a good estimation of what the sensors can detect, while the lidar model is capable of generating realistic data.