Soil-Mechanics-Aware Contact-Rich Earthmoving

Develop autonomous earthmoving methods that account for soil mechanics when performing contact-rich tasks such as surface compaction, piling, or backfilling by pushing material into a hole.

Background

The paper distinguishes conventional excavation tasks such as bucket filling and dumping from contact-rich operations that require reasoning about deformable, history-dependent soil behavior. Existing planning approaches often rely on geometric terrain updates or simplified interaction models, leaving more complex material-redistribution behaviors unresolved. The authors specifically identify surface compaction, piling, and pushing material back into a hole as examples of tasks requiring a more advanced understanding of tool–soil interaction.

References

For tasks such as bucket filling and dumping, these approaches have been effective, while tasks that require accounting for soil mechanics remain unsolved.

— Size Doesn't Matter: Material-State Reinforcement Learning for Excavator Transferable Soil Manipulation  (2609.12677 - Werner et al., 11 Sep 2026) in Section 2.1, “Model-Based Excavation Planning and Soil-Tool Interaction”