Hydraulic Excavator with Digging Operation Assisting System

2001.09 The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers by Kazuo Fujishima, Hiroshi Ogura and Sadahisa Tomita
Trench digging for underground pipelines has never been easy, especially the operator cannot set a guideline for digging reference and at times does not have a clear line of sight and needs to be assisted by another person. This paper describes the development of a hydraulic excavator equipped with an electrical lever system (In place of the conventional pilot lever). The excavator is equipped with a limited plane digging control system with a display monitor. With the help of this system the operator can pre-set a desired working plane through the monitor screen. Then digging control system will automatically control the actuators so that the bucket will not go below the set plane (Level).

This system also allows the plane to be set either horizontally or in any angle to the horizontal. The monitor will display the digging state in real time.

This systems will be quite useful especially for the City Water supply Pipe Lines, Storm Water Drains, Desilting of Canals, Sewer sytems, Telecom Cable laying and other under water digging applications viz for increasing the draft at the harbours, etc.

CAN bus Technology in Hydraulic Excavators for Efficient Communication

At the conference of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in Detroit 1986, staff from Robert Bosch GmbH presented the so-called Automotive Serial Controller Area Network (CAN). In the 1990s, CAN was very quick to gain significance, and is today the standard protocol in the automotive area. As CAN only provides a simple exchange of data, various application protocols based on CAN were developed. One of those is SAE J1939, which was specially developed for applications in heavy goods vehicles, buses and mobile machinery like Hydraulic Excavators. Today, SAE J1939 is used in many different types of vehicles for communication between various control devices, which are generally termed as Electronic Control Units (ECU).

It is also used in myriad other applications including factory automation, building automation, aircraft and aerospace.

The CAN bus replaced bulky wiring harnesses with a two-wire differential cable. With the increasing trend of integrating IT Solutions on Hydraulic Excavators for superior productivity and fuel efficiency, the need for CAN bus feature has become a bare necessity, As it contributes to superior reliability & diagnostic ease as compared to bulky wiring harnesses.

Some leading manufacturers like JCB have already adopted this feature on their JS200 Hydraulic Excavator.