Towards autonomous excavation by hydraulic excavator — Measurement and consideration on bucket posture and body stress in digging works

The Public Works Research Institute (PWRI) has conducted research on the autonomous control of construction machines to eliminate dangerous and laborsome work and has achieved automated execution of excavation and loading in a limited field. This automatic system, however, is not yet fully capable of adjusting to various soil and excavation conditions that are present during restoration work at disaster sites, the originally intended situation for unmanned construction. Basic experiment data then became necessary for us to realize automatic generation of a movement plan to cope with various work operations such as on-slope excavation and the various ground conditions resulting from things such as physical properties or the strength of quarried stone or sediments, and the control of remote-controlled construction machines under such varying conditions. This paper details the experiment we conducted to clarify the relationship between loads working on excavation and strain acting on the bucket link, with the posture and moving direction of the hydraulic shovel as parameters, and describes the basic data necessary to Automatic Control Technology coping with various phenomena at an actual site (such as obstacles).