Autonomous Construction Machinery

The task at hand is to develop an automation solution to an existing machine in the mining size category. This includes hardware retrofit and adding sensors to get machine and process feedback, as well as knowledge of position and the surroundings.

Most of the efforts are spent on the software development of the automation controller and the graphical user interface (GUI), enabling the machine operator to interact with the system – see diagram for overview.

The software of the automation controller includes:

• Adaptive and deep learning path planning algorithms, in order to compensate for hardness variation of the material to be moved.
• Real time simulation of cyber-physical machine model used as reference to assess machine health and generate feasible trajectories.
• Functionality to discretize surroundings into safe-operation zones, and tracking every part of the machine to stay within these zones, in order to provide safe operation for machine and personnel.
• Sensor fusion techniques to filter measured signals and combine various measurements to get a more detailed view of the surroundings.

A machine of this size is expensive to take out of production. Thus, most of the software development of the automation controller has been validated using a digital twin. The digital twin developed for this project, includes both hardware and software models, enabling continuous integration with model-in-loop (MiL) and hardware-in-loop (HiL) validation. This allows fast development cycles and high confidence in the developed algorithms, even with limited test on the actual machine.

When performing test on the machine and for the future commissioning, the digital twin is simply replaced in a plug-and-play like manner as indicated on the diagram below.

More information on the digital twin and workflow was shared at the High-Tech Summit of 2018, at DTU. The presentation given during the talk on digital twins, is shared here in a blog post.

If you would like to know more about how IPU can help you find solutions for your most complex challenges, contact us. Our international team of specialists will be happy to assist you.