Workspace description and simulation of a backhoe device for hydraulic excavators

Scheme design is an important creative stage of product design. How to analyze, compare and evaluate different design schemes qualitatively and quantitatively is an open problem to be solved in the field of design. This paper presents a quantitative analysis and calculation method for analyzing, comparing and evaluating the different design schemes of backhoe devices. The method consists of defining three kinds of different spaces for the description of backhoe devices' workspace, establishing the kinematics model of backhoe devices in joint space and solving the kinematics model to obtain the workspace by using the Monte Carlo method, and it can select the optimal design scheme from various scheme designs of backhoe devices. Then taking a backhoe device for the XG809F excavator as a case study, the design scheme selected by our method is the optimal scheme. It is verified by simulation methods and experiments, which demonstrates that the proposed method is an effective and practical quantitative analysis method for analyzing, comparing and evaluating the different design schemes of backhoe devices. Finally, it is pointed out that the distribution of excavation force of backhoe devices in their workspace is the direction for follow-up research at the end of the paper. •A quantitative calculation method of the workspace of backhoe devices is proposed.•Three kinds of different new spaces are defined for backhoe devices.•The kinematics model of the bucket tooth tip is established in joint space.•The Monte Carlo method is introduced to solve the workspace of backhoe devices.