Analysis of the information needs of an autonomous hauler in a quarry site

摘要

Autonomous and intelligent construction equipment is an emergent area of research, which shares many characteristics with on-road autonomous vehicles, but also have fundamental differences. Construction vehicles usually perform repetitive tasks in confined sites, such as quarries, and cooperate with other vehicles to complete common missions. A quarry can be viewed as a system-of-systems and the vehicles are individual systems within the site system. Therefore it is important to analyze the site system, i.e. included vehicles, surrounding systems, and system context, before the introduction of autonomous vehicles. It is necessary to map the needed infrastructure, and the needed input information from on-board sensors and off-board information suppliers, before designing the vehicle electronics system. This paper describes how we identified sensory and input signal needs for an autonomous articulated hauler in a scenario at a quarry site. Different architectural alternatives are evaluated and a set-up for a quarry site is suggested.