Toward an Autonomous Operation of Wheel Loaders in Collaboration with a Truck for a Construction Site

Wheel loaders are multi-purpose equipment mainly used for loading and unloading aggregates; earth-type materials such as soil and stone. It is a construction equipment that performs the vital work of loading/unloading and compressing materials in large-scale construction sites. Recently, some efforts have been implemented to automate a particular wheel loader-truck collaboration task through digitalizing construction information, firstly using and applying ICT and robot technologies. In this paper, the authors focus on the particular operation of wheel loaders in practice unmanned as the first step of the automated loading/unloading process and identify critical tasks to be digitalized. Also, for the safe and efficient operation and energy efficiency of wheel loaders, we classify transport and loading tasks, which are the most common tasks of wheel loaders, and propose autonomous operation scenarios for wheel loader automation and truck collaboration.