A Strategic Planner for Robot Excavation

This paper describes the implementation of a domain-specific strategic planner for an autonomous excavator, called EXCAVATION PLANEX. As a knowledge-based epert system, the planner is designed to assist in the automation of a power-shovel robotic excavator that performs open-cut excavation. The system has been applied in laboratory simulations independently as an automated planner. It plans for the excavation of a uniform sloping terrain given a desired excavation layout and the conditions observed during the actual process. Portioning the site into excavation sectors, defining reachable sections, and formulating basic strategic actions to perform (e.g. Move Excavator, Dig Section and scan Surroundings) are part of the system tasks. The planner uses a generic knowledge-based system architecture for process planning, PLANEX, which has been used in various application domains. This paper includes a description of the architecture, the control procedures and the knowledge representation.