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arXiv · 2608.21778

Vision Guided Target Conditioned Control for Autonomous Excavation

Shuai Zhao·Ji-An Pan·Junwei Li·Xun Tang·Fansen Xi·Qing Xu·Keqiang Li·Jianqiang Wang
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Abstract

Autonomous excavation requires an intelligent control system that can convert spatial work intent into coordinated bucket motion under contact-rich soil interaction. This paper presents a target-conditioned intelligent control framework for autonomous excavation in a physics-based deformable-soil simulation workflow. An image-aligned target mask serves as a visual spatial command for the desired digging region, while a mask-conditioned Action Chunking Transformer maps multi-view RGB observations, proprioception, and the target mask to temporally extended joystick commands. To reduce target-ignoring behavior, demonstrations are organized with paired-condition supervision, where the same or closely matched scene is demonstrated with different target masks and corresponding action chunks. The framework is evaluated through both a diagnostic manipulation task and an excavation simulation benchmark with single-scoop and sequential pile-clearing protocols. In manipulation, target success is 4\% for no-condition ACT, 63\% for non-paired mask-conditioned ACT, and 96\% for paired-condition mask-conditioned ACT. In sequential pile clearing, paired-condition mask-conditioned ACT removes 76.8\% of the pile versus 27.4\% and 15.7\% for the two baselines, with 91.0\% human-normalized efficiency. The results show that visual target conditioning, paired demonstration structure, and action-chunk control form a practical cyber-physical simulation pipeline for excavator automation.

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Shuai Zhao, Ji-An Pan, Junwei Li, Xun Tang, Fansen Xi, Qing Xu, Keqiang Li, Jianqiang Wang. 2026-08-22. Vision Guided Target Conditioned Control for Autonomous Excavation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21778

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