Towards Shared Control of Hydraulic Excavators

Presented at the 6th FPNI – PhD Symposium, June 15-19 2010, West Lafayette, Indiana.Presently, excavator operators manually control all functions of the machine. Decreases to a task's time or energy cost are historically achieved by designing better systems and components or through operator training. In contrast, the approach discussed here allows the human and machine to share control of the end effector to improve machine performance. The paper will introduce the idea of blended shared control in the context of excavation, and will show methods of describing the operator task. A filter that increases the robustness of the task identification is presented. Examples using experimental data are presented to illustrate the results. This approach can potentially decrease task completion time without requiring modification of the machine hardware