A practical interface for coordinated position control of an excavator arm

• A new hand control for hydraulic equipment is presented.
• It addresses practical challenges to implementing coordinated position control.
• It maintains the intuitiveness of coordinated position control.
• An experiment shows a significant increase in spoil removed and fuel efficiency.

This paper presents a new hand controller interface that addresses practical challenges to implementing coordinated position control (CPC) for an excavator arm. The new interface uses a hybrid control scheme with closed-loop CPC of the excavator arm and open-loop flow control of the swing. CPC is achieved using a joystick that is kinematically similar to the excavator arm. The kinematically similar joystick motion is planar. Thus, it can be mounted vertically, matching the excavator arm, or horizontally, which has many advantages, such as reduced operator fatigue. The new interface is compared to a conventional interface in a human subject experiment using a dynamic excavator simulator. The results demonstrate similar improvements in spoil removed and fuel efficiency as previous CPC approaches while being more practically designed. Although the design is for an excavator, the concepts presented can apply to a range of hydraulic manipulators.