Earthwork research activities are focused towards the introduction of new control techniques to existing civil machinery: excavators, graders, etc. Dynamics and kinematics control together with the force/torque feedback in the excavator bucket [17], [18] are important issues towards robotic autonomous excavation [19]. Moreover, it is necessary to model the soil and obtain real-time terrain data using, for example, LADARs, as used in several projects at NIST [20]. Teleoperation of backhoe excavators, remotely operated using visual and force feedback [21], is very much appreciated by operators. These techniques are indispensable for the operation of big civil machines like 100-m boom-length draglines [22] or 25-ton CMUs excavators for autonomous truck loading [23].