When a surface needs to be levelled such as for laying a slab of concrete, building a road, landscaping or the like, earth moving equipment is generally used to minimise the amount of manual labour required. Earth moving equipment conventionally comprises a motorised prime mover, self propelled on wheels or tracks and one or more hydraulically driven working arms to which tools such as diggers, buckets, dozing blades, or grading blades are attached to perform their respective functions.
The working arms can move only in the vertical plane to enable the entire arm or the articulated portions arm to be raised and lowered vertically relative to the prime mover to adjust the height and angle in the vertical plane of the tool attached to the arm. Movement of the tool in the horizontal plane, in particular sideways movement and large movements forward and backward are only achieved by movement of the prime mover with the arm and tool attached. Hydraulic or mechanical controls may be provided for operating the tools, such as for opening and for closing dampers or crushers.
The equipment and attached tools enable the majority of heavy work to be performed, however finishing and precise work has generally required significant manual labour. A recent development in grading equipment, for spreading particulate matter such as sand, soil, crushed rock etc, is a laser grading system. In this development the level of a grading blade is automatically adjusted, based on a reference datum from a laser, in order to dynamically adjust the amount of particulate matter being deposited or moved to maintain a level surface of grading. Although the adjustment of the height of the blade should correlate to the amount of particulate matter being deposited or moved, the amount of particulate matter actually deposited can vary based on the weight of the particulate matter or the amount of the particulate matter accumulated on the grading blade, so the end result is not a perfectly level surface. Further, the manoeuvrability of the equipment can limit the area accessed by the grader blade such that significant manual work is then still required for levelling areas not reached and/or for correcting other levelling errors to finish the job.