Iterative Learning Control for Soil Loading Operation of Excavator

In general, the automatic excavator can provide the high productivity output and also increase the safety factor by reducing the risk of the operations at the mine sites at the same time. In this paper, we focus on the loading operation of an excavator to the vessels on the dump trucks. Firstly, we use an optimization method that can decide the best deposit positions on the vessel. By depositing the soil following the positions above, the error between the desired soil shape and the deposited soil shape is decreased. Moreover, we adopt an iterative learning control (ILC) method in order to improve the error of the soil shape by taking an advantage of the repetative nature of the loading operation. Finally, we demonstrate both simulation and experiment results which show that the deposited soil shape efficiently approaches to the desired shape.