A PC Cluster High-Fidelity Mobile Crane Simulator

The mobile crane simulator is a project sponsored by Employment and Vocational Training Administration, Council of Labor Affair, Executive Yuan, Taiwan, to build a safe device for training and licensing. This paper presents the principle and mechanism to build a high-fidelity interactive visual simulator on a cluster of PCs. The implemented mobile crane simulator uses the peer-to-peer architecture with the push and pull mechanism to achieve the parallelism among distributed tasks. A distributive simulation socket, called Communication Backbone(CB), is adopted to integrate the functional tasks of the mobile crane simulator in a PC clustering environment. With CB, tasks of the simulated mobile crane are executed as standalone applications and seamlessly communicate with each other through CB. Finally, the system response rate of the implemented mobile crane simulator achieves 16 times per second which is larger than human acceptable perception rate as suggested by the human factors studies.