Autonomous excavator control is challenged by coupled kinematics, actuation lag, and uncertainty. We propose imitation learning and adaptive Cartesian tracking (IL-ACT), a novel motion control framework for a 30-ton-class excavator. An anchored, 14-input imitation policy pretrained on operator demonstrations generates nominal joint rates; adaptive Cartesian feedback and gated gain/bias estimation correct these commands before a stopping-distance governor constrains joint-reference generation. Simscape evaluation covers 100 sequential goals and spiral, figure-eight, and rounded-raster tracking, including 88 additional runs across three training seeds, two initializations, and speeds, under hydraulic response and sensing conditions. Compared with Teacher+ACT, IL-ACT completes all goals with shorter duration and lower terminal errors under both response conditions. Telemetry-initialized IL-ACT lowers RMSE in all 24 figure-eight and rounded-raster seed comparisons and lowers additional-load spiral mean RMSE by approximately 29%. Original spiral RMSE also improves over IL-only and PID. Under a shared sensor-noise realization, telemetry-initialized IL-ACT achieves 27.67% lower mean RMSE than Teacher+ACT; enabling estimation reduces mean RMSE by 22.44% relative to the frozen estimator. Pretrained-weight effects remain mixed, and the original teacher comparison exhibits a spiral RMSE--maximum-error tradeoff. Analysis establishes bounded adaptive states and Cartesian feedback, with reference admissibility conditional on governor feasibility.
Developing autonomous hydraulic excavators is constrained by limited access to physical machines and the high cost of real-world experimentation. This paper proposes a simulation-to-real framework for learning a system-level digital surrogate using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Instead of modeling internal dynamics, the excavator is treated as an input-output operator, and the surrogate is trained to reproduce its closed-loop behavior under identical control inputs. The approach is first validated in a MuJoCo simulation environment and then transferred to a real excavator. To address measurement inconsistencies in real-world data, a consistency-aware state estimation method based on adaptive Kalman filtering is introduced. Experimental results demonstrate that the learned surrogate achieves high fidelity in both angular velocity and long-horizon trajectory reproduction under closed-loop autoregressive evaluation. These results confirm that the proposed model can serve as a drop-in surrogate for both simulation and physical systems, enabling scalable and efficient development of excavation automation algorithms.
Earthmoving tasks such as excavation, backfilling, or embankment construction require deliberate repositioning of deformable soil. For these tasks, human operators use all shovel faces, while autonomous systems so far are limited to excavation and dumping. Current methods often rely on heuristic models but do not incorporate soil mechanics. We address this shortcoming by using Reinforcement Learning in a GPU-parallelized Material Point Method particle simulation. Our controllers are conditioned on material state such as shape and compactness, enabling skills that use multiple contact faces of the tool and displace material both inside and outside of the shovel. To use the same learned weights across machines, our policies operate in a normalized end-effector space and are deployed through a calibrated machine interface. We evaluate this calibrated transfer on an 11.5t hydraulic excavator and a 500g tabletop robot. We validate performance through autonomous construction of a 42m long, 2.1m high embankment in 45min, executing 201 individual policy strokes without failure, retry, or operator intervention. In a direct comparison, the autonomous controller matches an expert operator's progression speed and produces a higher, more consistent embankment. Additional qualitative backfilling and compaction experiments demonstrate the material-state awareness and calibrated transfer across machines.
Modern imitation learning methods, including visuomotor and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies, typically output high-level action references that are executed by low-level controllers. However, the absence of higher-order reference signals, together with the policy's lack of awareness of the underlying low-level control dynamics during training, inevitably induces an execution gap. As a result, realized actions deviate systematically from policy-commanded ones, with a critical impact on precision-sensitive manipulation. Prior work either modifies the policy architecture or the low-level controller, both requiring intrusive changes to the pretrained policy or packaged controller. This raises a natural question: when the policy and controller are both treated as inaccessible black boxes, can we bridge the execution gap? We propose Adaptive Policy Execution (APEX), a plug-and-play framework inserted between the policy and the controller that reconstructs a dynamically feasible reference from policy outputs and adapts at test-time according to low-level state feedback, with a provable convergence guarantee. Extensive empirical studies show that APEX reduces controller-induced tracking error by 41.2% on demonstration replay and improves manipulation success by 4.8--25.8 percentage points across four visuomotor and VLA policy classes.