Autonomous Excavation Trajectory Generation for Trenching Tasks Based on Skills of Skillful Operator

In this paper, a new autonomous excavation trajectory generation system is proposed. Instead of controlling the excavator to follow the teaching path precisely, our system replans the skillful operator's arbitrary bumpy digging and slow trajectory into a topological equivalent trajectory to ensure a fast and smooth excavation process. In this paper, the waypoints which are equivalent to the teaching path topology are found by several manual excavation tracks. The trajectory is then parameterized to obtain the minimum time-jerk trajectory under kinodynamic constraints. The trajectory generation method proposed in this paper is integrated into a complete autonomous excavation platform and the feasibility of this system is verified in a field test.