Hydraulic Control Design for Digging Trajectory Tracking of Scale Model Excavator

Although we previously evaluated the payload and consumed energy of the automated digging of hydraulic excavators using computer simulation, we did not conduct verification experiments with a real excavator. We therefore retrofitted a 1/14 scale model radio-controlled hydraulic excavator and developed it as an experimental excavator to reproduce our simulation. This model has the same hydraulic problems, such as oil leakage and response delay, as a real excavator. In this study, we designed the controllers of this scale model considering its hydraulic characteristics, conducted trajectory tracking experiments, and followed up by modifying the controllers to improve the tracking accuracy.