Development of remote control system of construction machinery using pneumatic robot arm

In the restoration work from disasters, the remote control of construction machinery is required to ensure the worker´s safety. However, only limited numbers of remote controlled construction machinery exist and they are typically larger than conventional machinery. After a disaster, the transportation of such machinery takes additional times and is often troublesome. Therefore, it would be desirable to develop a remote control system that could easily be installed on ordinary construction machinery. We have been developing a pneumatic robot system, which can be installed in any models of construction machinery, with the aim of easy installation and portability. In consideration of portability, the lightweight pneumatic artificial rubber muscle (PARM) was adopted as the actuator of the robot arm. In this research, we developed a remote control system of construction machinery using the 6-DOF pneumatic robot arm. We used a wireless LAN for the remote control. We did experiment on the remote control of construction machinery and showed that the developed system is available for remote control of construction machinery.