Development of the Autonomous Hydraulic Excavator Prototype Using 3-D Information for Motion Planning and Control

Abstract

Civil engineering work still involves many dangerous and grueling tasks. So improving work environments and ensuring safety are important challenges facing in this field. It is also essential to develop to prepare for the aging of construction workers and growing shortage of young skilled workers, which will occur in response to the falling birthrate and aging of the future population. This research project was undertaken as challenges to overcome these problems by developing the basic technologies for automated construction system using the three-dimensional information and achieving self-controlled operation by hydraulic excavators which is a typical general purpose construction machine. The developed prototype excavator has achieved the self-control of soil excavation and loading work, with the almost same speed and with the same precision in finished product to those of normal work by human worker.