Excavation Path Generation for Autonomous Excavator Considering Bulking Factor of Soil

This paper proposes an excavation path generationmethod for autonomous excavators by considering the bulking factor of soil. In existing research on autonomous excavation, the excavator's path was manually planned, based on known soil properties. Thus, the efficiency of the excavation process may reduce in situations where the soil properties are unknown. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel method for generating an excavation path based on the bulking factor and for realizing an efficient excavation for any soil type. The bulking factor is estimated by sensing data of the target soil during the excavation. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate an efficient excavation path for different soil properties.