Modeling and control of hydraulic excavator’s arm

In order to find a feasible way to control excavator’s arm and realize autonomous excavation, the dynamic model for the boom of excavator’s arm which was regarded as a planar manipulator with three degrees of freedom was constructed with Lagrange equation. The excavator was retrofitted with electrohydraulic proportional valves, associated sensors (three inclinometers) and a computer control system (the motion controller of EPEC). The full nonlinear mathematic model of electrohydraulic proportional system was achieved. A discontinuous projection based on an adaptive robust controller to approximate the nonlinear gain coefficient of the valve was presented to deal with the nonlinearity of the whole system, the error was dealt with by robust feedback and an adaptive robust controller was designed. The experiment results of the boom motion control show that, using the controller, good performance for tracking can be achieved, and the peak tracking error of boom angles is less than 4°. Foundation item: Project(2003AA430200) supported by the National Hi-Tech Research and Development Program(863) of China