Abstract

Improving safety and productivity of earthwork operations is of paramount importance, especially in congested sites where collisions are more probable. Real-time Location Systems and Automated Machine Guidance and Control technologies are expected to improve both safety and productivity of earthwork operations by providing excavator operators a higher level of support regarding the path planning of excavators based on site conditions. However, in spite of the large number of studies related to automated path planning of excavators using well established algorithms from robotics, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) and Probabilistic Roadmaps (PRM), these studies do not fully consider the engineering constrains of the equipment and do not result in smooth and optimal paths that can be applied in practice. This research aims to improve the path planning of excavators in a congested site where the speed of the algorithm and the quality of the path significantly influence the overall performance of the earthwork operations. The proposed method is implemented and tested in Unity 3D game engine environment for visualization and verification purposes. The efficiency of the proposed method in generating a collision-free path, which can ensure improved productivity, is verified both quantitatively and visually. The comparative results with other recent and modified versions of the RRT algorithm show that the proposed algorithm is able to find a higher quality path in a shorter time.