<title>Telemanipulation and supervisory control of a backhoe excavator</title>

Abstract

The excavation tasks present one of the more challenging area in robotic research. The environment is highly unstructured, the forces that appear are very large it is very important the detection of underground obstacles to avoid any damage, and the modeling of the hydraulic actuators is highly nonlinear. In recent years, the remote control of the excavation has found applications in very dangerous environments for human beings, like nuclear power plants, nuclear and chemical waste facilities and terrestrial and extra-terrestrial mining. Some kind of intelligence is required due to the presence of unexpected situations. The first approach to deal with the problem is to put a human being in the loop, that is: teleoperation. The next step towards the total automation of the excavation is the supervisory control of the task. In this scheme, the operator acts like a supervisor, providing high level commands, and checking the development and accomplishment of the task. The solutions that DISAM has developed are presented in this paper, as well as future work that will be very useful in the search for the total automation of excavation tasks.