“Given the shortage of skilled hands in our area, that’s added production we’ve needed.” Nuts And Bolts “Built’s autonomous dozer is the real deal, and we’ve had it finish-grade hundreds of pads so far,” said Eric McCosker, project manager at Independent Construction. One company, which works in heavy civil construction and grading, used Built Robotics-equipped dozers to finish housing pads in a residential development. Excavation and other prep work is also being completed by autonomous or semi-autonomous bulldozers, which can ready a jobsite with the help of a human programmer to exact specifications. Some companies are applying self-driving construction machinery to do repetitive tasks, such as pouring concrete, bricklaying, welding and even demolition. The fully autonomous operation means that the mine can operate 24 hours a day, with all operations overseen from a remote operation center. It operates with fully automated trucks, loaders and drills. The next generation of very large fleets of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, however, is expected to address this problem.ĭesigned in partnership with Swedish engineering company Sandvik, the Syama underground gold mine became the world’s first fully-autonomous mine operation. In these remote areas, there are generally no cell towers and no Wi-Fi, and communication is currently expensive with limited bandwidth. Work sites are often in remote areas, on steep slopes, and in very rugged and variable terrain. Meanwhile, the forestry sector has seen limited progress with automation, largely due to working conditions being over considerably larger areas than those experienced by the other sectors. This will remain the case until more tasks, and not just movement, become automated. The determining factors here are farmer perception and added value. As mentioned above, autonomous heavy haulers are already in use in mining in several countries, with automated agricultural and forestry equipment currently being developed as well. While a blend of GPS and other location tracking sensors, image sensors and telematics assist John Deere vehicles to navigate fields today, the company still can’t truly replicate everything a human would see and feel sitting in the tractor cab. However, given global equipment sales are projected to grow 2.5% each year until 2022, coupled with the exponential growth in adoption of AVs, the market share is expected to double in size in the next two years.Īutomated shuttle buses are in use in many countries. The Current Status of Autonomous EquipmentĪutonomous vehicles (AVs) currently hold a market share of less than 1% of total construction equipment sales worldwide.
To date, Caterpillar has 276 autonomous trucks in operation have driven over 42 million miles without a lost-time injury. As of June 2020, those numbers have jumped to 3 billion tons moved by 251 trucks, and the fleet still currently maintains a perfect safety record with no incidents.Īs another example of the exponential rate this industry is developing, Caterpillar has doubled the amount hauled in the 16 months since reaching 1 billion tons hauled in November of 2018. By 2018, Komatsu had moved over 2 billion tons, with 130 fully autonomous mining trucks running across seven operational sites (six of which are fully autonomous sites). The lessons learned from those applications eventually led to the first North American deployment in 2016. Finally, in 2013, Komatsu introduced the world’s first dozer with fully automatic blade control. From a remote operations center in Perth, Western Australia, workers operate autonomous mining vehicles at mines more than 1,200 kilometers away. Just a year later, in 2008, another system was launched at a Western Australia iron ore mining operation.
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However, the process actually began with the release of the Field Management Software (FMS) for mines in the late 1980s, and it became the foundation for Komatsu’s autonomous platform. The first commercial deployment was in Chile in 2007. The first autonomous testing began in Japan in 1990. Future off-road autonomous equipment will handle the cycle of operation and cyclical tasks, while teleguided machines are maneuvered by operators, sometimes in simulators thousands of miles away.
These machines are poised to have a profound impact in the off-road environment, upsetting and defying current models in relation to the size of the equipment and the role of the dealers and OEMs, as well as impacting the individual operator.Īlthough the equipment sectors that AEM represents have historically been hesitant to adopt innovative technologies, they are set for a significant amount of change, as autonomous vehicles (AV) dramatically alter the nature of the work. By Jeff Jurgens, AEM Director of Product StewardshipĪutonomous equipment offers significant benefits with respect to efficiency, cost savings and safety.
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