Development of sand volume estimator for under-struck excavator bucket using single camera

To support the intelligence of construction environment, it is important to measure the workload of excavator in real time. But, previous studies are expensive to implement or can not processed in real time. In this paper, an image-based method to estimate the workload of the excavator bucket especially for the state of under-struck is proposed by assuming the shape of bucket and the shape of sand inside the bucket as geometric models. By analyzing the relation between single camera image and actual bucket geometry, the volume of sand which is proportional to the excavator workload is estimated. The experimental results show 93.5% accuracy even though only some part of sand region is unseen.