What is ISO 10968 about?

ISO 10968 specifies requirements and guidelines for the operator’s controls on earth-moving machinery as defined in ISO 6165, in as far as those controls relate to any direct-control machine. The recommendations are given for finger-, hand- and foot-operated controls are not intended to prevent usage of other types of controls, control locations or control movements.

Note: ISO 10968 is not applicable to devices that are not directly related to machine control.

Note: For remote operator control of machines, see ISO 15817.

Who is ISO 10968 for?

ISO 10968 on operator's controls of earth-moving machinery is relevant to:

Machine manufacturers and suppliers
Machine operators
Machine designers
Mechanical engineers

Why should you use ISO 10968?

Earth-moving equipment is large machinery, mainly heavy-duty vehicles designed for earthwork construction tasks. The most common ones are excavators, bull dozers and dump trucks. As machines have gone through significant developments over the years, ISO 10968 covers both legacy machines and state-of-the-art solutions.

With rapidly development in levers, even in a specific machine family, ISO 10968 tries to account for the most advanced excavators, whereby more controls are added to levers in order to allow for more functionality.

ISO 10968 specifies the minimum distance between two adjacent controls, so that unintentional activation of controls such as machine acceleration, deceleration or vibration, is prevented.

Guidelines on the suitable measures to avoid damage by external forces, movement of controls, maximum control actuating force as per the operation, are indicated in ISO 10968.

Overall, standardising guidelines on use of operator’s control of earth-moving machinery will enable you to incorporate best practices for usage and safety of individuals, thereby improving operational efficiency of the machine and avoid disruptions in tasks.

What’s changed since the last update?

BS ISO 10968:2020 supersedes BS ISO 10968:2004, which is withdrawn. BS ISO 10968:2020

includes some technical changes with respect to BS ISO 10968:2004. These include:

The document has been reorganized for easier interpretation
Minimum and normal actuating forces have been removed
State-of-the-art solutions have been taken into account

BS ISO 10968:2020

Earth-moving machinery. Operator's controls

Current

Published:

31 May 2020