Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control has been widely used in industrial equipment. However, the transient response obtained is poor when the fixed PID controller is used for nonlinear systems. Moreover, a hydraulic excavator consists of a nonlinear system with a derivative element. In this case, the system output does not track the reference signal because the integral element in the controller is canceled out by the derivative element in the system. In order to improve the transient response and the tracking performance, a data-driven PID control for tuning and updating PID gains has been proposed. However, the data-driven PID control method could not improve the tracking performance. In this paper, the controller design scheme based on a data-driven approach for the hydraulic excavator is proposed. Moreover, the control parameters of the proposed scheme are updated in an off-line manner by using fictitious reference iterative tuning. The effectiveness of this controller is verified by simulating the control behavior of a hydraulic excavator.