Double-front construction machinery, which was designed for complicated tasks, requires intelligent systems that can provide the quantitative work analysis needed to determine effective work procedures and that can provide operational and cognitive support for operators. Construction work environments are extremely complicated, however, and this makes state identification difficult. We therefore defined primitive static states (PSS) that are determined using on-off data for the lever inputs and manipulator loads for each part of the grapple and front and that are completely independent of the various environmental conditions and operator skill levels. To confirm the usefulness of PSS, we performed experiments with a demolition task by using our virtual reality simulator. We confirmed that PSS could robustly and accurately identify the work states and that untrained skills could be easily inferred from the PSS-based work analysis. We also confirmed in skill-training experiments that advice information using PSS-based skill analysis greatly improved work performance. We thus confirmed that PSS can adequately identify work states and are useful for work analysis and skill improvement.
This research was supported in part by Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd., and in part by Research Institute for Science and Engineering in Waseda University, and in part by Global COE Program "Global Robot Academia", MEXT, Japan.