Demonstration of Autonomous Driving Control for a Retrofitted Wheel Loader

Abstract

Most research on automating gravel pile transport using wheel loaders has been performed primarily through simulations. Thus, studies should evaluate the usefulness of automatic gravel pile transportation by demonstrating it with an actual wheel loader. This study demonstrates automatic driving control using a retrofitted 3-ton wheel loader for gravel pile transportation. The driving model of a retrofitted wheel loader, in which multiple control systems are interlocked, is considered a simple control model with one input and one output for the pedal and vehicle velocity as well as for the steering wheel and steering angular velocity. In this study, we propose a simple and practical method for constructing a driving model via simple response analysis using an actual machine by constructing a feedforward control model based on control input/output using step responses. In this study, feedforward control was applied to the translation of the vehicle, which has a large dead time. By generating the path following the target point from the vehicle predicted position after the dead time from the driving model, the appropriate control input value calculation considering the dead time was performed. By applying the proposed method to a retrofitted wheel loader in a real environment and evaluating the control performance through control experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method in practice was demonstrated.