Autonomous Control of Excavator Boom

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Author
Date
2021-01-25
Department
Major/Subject
Control, Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Mcode
ELEC3025
Degree programme
AEE - Master’s Programme in Automation and Electrical Engineering (TS2013)
Language
en
Pages
59 + 5
Series
Abstract
Non-Road Mobile Machinery (NRMM) are essential equipment widely used in construction and mining. These types of equipment include forklifts, excavators, bulldozers, and mobile cranes. Irrespective of their functionality, all these equipment have a common trait where their action in performing said functions are repetitive. Moreover, their operating environment is most often hazardous or dangerous and requires a highly trained and skilled professional to work with them. Owing to their function being of a repetitive nature, bringing autonomy to perform these actions can be quite advantageous. It can help reduce the operating costs significantly and increase productivity by running them at all times with minimum stoppages. However, research towards integrating autonomy to these types of machinery is still in its infancy. In this thesis, a control system is designed and developed to perform the digging operation of an excavator autonomously when the digging location is known. MATLAB-Simulink coupled with a digital replica of an excavator, modeled in Mevea software, is used as the setup to develop and test the control system. Since this is a novel approach in developing a control system using a digital replica of an actual excavator, the main objective of the test is to evaluate its feasibility. The results indicate that the control system is robust enough to traverse the excavator boom to the desired location and perform dig action with minimum artifacts in motion. In the future, the deployment of this control system on an actual excavator can be explored. Furthermore, this work can be extended towards the development of a fully autonomous excavator by incorporating additional sensors.
Description
Supervisor
Pietola, Matti
Thesis advisor
Heikkinen, Jani
Minav, Tatiana
Keywords
non-road mobile machinery (NRMM), excavator boom, digital twin, autonomous control, kinematics, closed loop control system
Other note
Citation
Permanent link to this item
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202101311765
Collections
[dipl] Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu / ELEC