Abstract
Power shovels are used to clear wreckage after natural disasters but the process can consume a lot of time. Furthermore, operating such heavy machines in those circumstances is very dangerous for the involved human workers. To speed up access to inner parts of disaster stricken areas, obstacles can be surmounted with the assistance of carefully maneuvered arm, instead of removing them. In this paper, an autonomous obstacle surmounting technique for an unmanned power shovel is proposed. Out of different sequences, the one that optimizes the total energy consumption is chosen as the best candidate for surmounting a given step-like obstacle. Simulation and experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
