Abstract:

In this project soil-tool interaction forces during excavation were examined. To do this a
test-rig was developed and used to record and compute magnitudes of soil failure forces
obtained from experimenting on three types of soil. A flat blade assembly fitted with a
force-torque sensor and gripped by a robotic hand was used to execute excavation in a
laboratory-size soil bed also developed by this project. The robotic hand was
programmed to facilitate experimentation with different settings of blade insertion angles
and insertion depths. The computed soil failure forces were in turn used to estimate soil
properties using a soil property estimation technique being developed at the College.
Project tasks included design and construction of the said test rig, incorporating into it a
Force-Torque sensing scheme for quantifying forces imparted to the excavation blade,
programming a robot arm to carry out robotic excavation, setting up a system for
collecting and processing of the force-torque data and finally use of the analysed data to
estimate properties of the soil samples. If sources of errors are eliminated, the
experimental methods developed can helpful to the development of on line soil property
estimation for excavation machines.