Forklift Safety Training with a Virtual Reality Simulator

Forklifts are an important part of the industry, handling heavy loads across various terrains and environments. Often, with additional hazards such as pedestrians, other forklifts, and a restricted field of view. These conditions increase the accident risks.Thousands of accidents with partly heavy injuries and even deaths happen every year in Germany alone. Most accidents could be prevented by drivers if safety guidelines were consistently followed. These safety guidelines tend to fade over time. Therefore, safety training is highly beneficial. Safety training typically uses a real forklift, limitingsimulated scenarios due to safety risks to the driver and pedestrians. These limitations can be avoided by moving the training into Virtual Reality(VR). The forklift simulator introduced in this diploma thesis uses an HMD, steering wheel, pedals, and joysticks to simulate a real forklift environment while eliminating the risk of injury. Additionally, the material and organisational costs of a real forklift, the simulated training environment,and the pedestrian actors in traditional forklift training are removed. The introduced Virtual Reality forklift simulator is easily portable and includes a flexible scenario editor to cover and train on various hazardous situations. The simulator is integrated into the existing Unity application VROnSite, a VR training simulator for emergency services. The integration into this application enables the use of the described scenario editing and the After Action Review, which allows post-training review of training errors in a 3D environment, further improving training effectiveness.The simulator focuses on safety training refreshment to reduce future accidents. For this,the simulation introduces a training mode in which the driver is warned about everysafety error they make during training. The error is described to the driver immediately after it occurs, and in the After Action Review, maximizing the learning rate.