Improving Health and Safety Through Conveyor System Training in a Virtual Environment

Preventing injuries and fatalities related to conveyor system use in the mining industry is important and increases uptime while decreasing lost time. The research presented here is funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and intended to accomplish this prevention by the use virtual environments (VEs) to improve training and help miners better understand the hazards of working around conveyor systems. Two conveyor system VEs designed to teach miners about hazards and to safely complete tasks around conveyor systems were developed for this project. The first conveyor system VE, called the instructional tour, gives the miner a semi-automated tour of a conveyor system and teaches the miner about possible hazards (eg, missing guarding) and how to safely fix conveyor problems (eg, a stuck idler) using lock-out, tag-out procedures. The second, called the virtual shift, allows the miner to freely navigate around a conveyor system to detect and avoid hazards. The miner is presented with equipment failures that need to be safely repaired during the virtual shift. If the miner fails to identify and avoid a hazard or fix a failure in a safe manner, an animation of the consequences is shown to the miner, who must start the virtual shift over. The models for the conveyor system VEs were created using 3DS Max. Desktop versions of the VEs were then created using Deep CreatorÖ, an authoring application for creating interactive 3D environments. Later, more realistic versions of the VEs were created for CAVEÖ, a room-sized visualisation system, using DIVERSE, an application programming interface. In initial evaluations of the conveyor system VEs, mining colleagues have indicated great interest in such training tools. According to their feedback, these and similar VEs would provide excellent alternatives to normal classroom training and serve as positive precursors to hands-on experience. These VEs provide new miners a chance to experience hazards associated with working around conveyor systems without being in possible danger.