AES: Autonomous Excavator System for Real-World and Hazardous Environments
This addresses safety and productivity issues for workers in industries such as mining and construction, but appears incremental as it builds on existing autonomous systems for hazardous environments.
The paper tackles the problem of operating excavators in hazardous real-world environments like mining and construction, where extreme conditions cause fatalities and injuries, by proposing an autonomous excavator system to substitute human operators, aiming to lower injuries and improve productivity.
Excavators are widely used for material-handling applications in unstructured environments, including mining and construction. The size of the global market of excavators is 44.12 Billion USD in 2018 and is predicted to grow to 63.14 Billion USD by 2026. Operating excavators in a real-world environment can be challenging due to extreme conditions and rock sliding, ground collapse, or exceeding dust. Multiple fatalities and injuries occur each year during excavations. An autonomous excavator that can substitute human operators in these hazardous environments would substantially lower the number of injuries and can improve the overall productivity.