Estimation of Excavated Soil Volume for Backhoe Operation by Measuring Posture of Backhoe

Abstract

In recent years, the construction industry has promoted the automation of construction using 3D data. In particular, the volume of soil excavated by a backhoe is important information for managing an earth moving of construction sites. In this paper, a system for estimating the volume of soil in a backhoe’s bucket is proposed. The backhoe of our proposed system mounts multiple RGB-D sensors to capture the bucket without occlusions. The relative positions of the RGB-D sensors are estimated by using the IMUs attached on the backhoe’s links. Thus, the 3D point cloud data of the soil observed by the sensors are integrated, and the volume can be estimated. In an experiment with a real construction machinery, the performance of our proposed method was validated.