The tracked hydraulic excavator is one of the most versatile and widely utilised piece of earthmoving equipment. In many instances, the ‘excavator’ represents the first choice of earthmoving plant for both construction managers and estimators, since when properly employed (i.e. with a competent operator and in an appropriate working environment), it offers high production rates at economical cost. Nonetheless, predicting machine production performance is difficult; given the typical multiple operational parameters (e.g. machine weight, machine configuration, ground conditions, operator ability) that can apply. Consequently, determination of accurate cost estimates and predicted contract durations are subject to considerable inaccuracy, especially where a significant amount of site work is needed.
To address this inadequacy, this paper presents a computational intelligent ‘fuzzy’ model with the ability to forecast excavator cycle time. In this context, a cycle is defined as one complete revolution, from ‘place empty bucket in dig material’ through ‘fill bucket’, ‘move charged bucket to target’, ‘empty charged bucket’ and ‘return bucket to dig material’. The developed model is based upon 70 separate cycle time observations obtained from four plant manufacturers. These data provide a representative spread of machine cycle times since they include a range on a continuum from optimum to adverse operational parameters. Tests on the derived model identified that its accuracy was acceptable; but the accuracy could be improved using larger samples and a more comprehensive and exhaustive range of variables to predict machine cycle time. 相似文献
In this paper, we present a control framework for the control of a hydraulic excavator. An excavator can be viewed as a robotic manipulator that interacts with the environment. It follows that the control method employed to control the excavator must take into account the complex soil–tool interaction in order to achieve the desired trajectory of the manipulator. Impedance control has been proven to be effective in this aspect in that it provides an unified approach to constrained and unconstrained motion. Another important aspect when considering the automation of an excavator is the control of the hydraulic servo system. Obtaining a useful explicit model for the control of hydraulic servo systems is not a simple task due to their inherent complex nonlinearity. Therefore, control techniques that do not require an explicit representation of the plant are required. In this work, we integrate two controllers for the automation of an excavator. To control the rigid-body motion of the excavator, impedance control and sliding mode control are applied. The results are desired cylinder forces that are required to achieve the desired trajectory. Given the desired cylinder forces, an online learning control method is employed to control the hydraulic servo system so that the desired forces are generated. Echo-state networks, which are a class of recurrent neural networks, are utilized within the online learning control framework in order to learn an inverse model of the hydraulic servo system. Thus, the online learning control framework does not require an explicit model of the plant and also adapts to the plant using only the input and output signals. We present results of the proposed control framework on an excavator simulation environment that has been verified based on operation data from a real hydraulic excavator. 相似文献