Improved Soil Shape on the Dump Truck for Soil Loading Operation of Excavator

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 improvement of soil shape on the dump truck's vessel for a soil loading operation of excavator by bring up a new method which is called flattening operation. The basic concept of this method is to make some parts of steep shape of the soil on a vessel flat by control the movement of the excavator's bucket to be straight toward to the soil on the dump truck's vessel after finishing the soil deposition on the vessel. Firstly, we use a conventional optimization method that can decide the best deposit positions on the vessel. By depositing the soil at the positions we got above, the error between the desired soil shape and the deposited soil shape will be decreased. Next, we conduct the combination between conventional optimization and flattening operation which means the output of the optimization not only decide the best deposit positions but also need to consider the flattening height and the best deposit position may change according to the flattening operation. Finally, we demonstrate both simulation and experimental results and a comparison of the results between the conventional optimization and the new proposed method.