Trajectory Control of Excavator with Experimental Estimation of Cylinder Output Force

Hydraulic excavator is one of the most widely used heavy machines in construction sites including dismantling. In the dismantling sites, the excavators equipped with crusher or breaker carry out dangerous operations, so drivers are always exposed to unexpected danger. For safety operation, remote control of the hydraulic excavator has been studied using proportional control valve, which requires an appropriate motion control of its bucket tip. In this case, kinematics and dynamics analysis have to be preceded through modeling of excavator. However, it is difficult to acquire reasonable results from the analysis due to insufficient information of physical parameters such as mass of each links and locations of mass centers, etc. This study deals with the trajectory control of bucket tip, which is based on experimental estimation of cylinder output force. The estimated forces are fed into the control of each cylinder in order to compensate gravitational and frictional effects in the cylinders. The control was applied to horizontal trajectories that are for flattening work.