Mining equipment giant Caterpillar want to automate their haul trucks and they recently struck a deal with Carnegie Mellon University's Tony Stentz to make it so. These soon to be robotic trucks are massive vehicles that cost more than $5,000,000 (that's five million dollars) each and are used for surface mining operations all over the world. A single Caterpillar 797B truck can haul over 300-tonnes of material on a single load. A single tire for this truck is worth over $40,000. Just so that you get a good idea of how massive these vehicles truly are, check out the video below showing a haul truck driving over an SUV (the 797B eats the average monster truck for breakfast.)
In case you are wondering why Caterpillar wants to automate these behemoths, there are many reasons. First of all, there is a shortage in skilled workers and the mining industry is hurting because of it. Second, the jobs are undesirable and difficult part because of the harsh weather and part because of the remote locations of many surface mines. People just don't want to work in very hot and dusty environments. Moreover, as you may have noticed from the video above, there are safety reasons why mining companies would prefer to remove people from operations that involve such large vehicles. Fatal accidents in mining happen more often than one expects. Finally, by automating the vehicles, the mining companies can increase their utilization and in effect their profits.
The CMU team is facing a huge challenge for the next few years. Automating a haul truck to operate in an unfriendly environment while minimizing the number of accidents will not be an easy job. But if any have the experience and know-how to create these robotic trucks then Tony Stentz (who is already working on autonomous underground mining) and his CMU field robotics group are Caterpillar's best bet. Expect these vehicles to make heavy usage of GPS receivers and laser sensors for localization and obstacle avoidance.
2 comments:
3:15 PM
Amazing, the work coming out of the robotics lab there is always cutting edge.
3:41 PM
If they're using lasers in that kind of environment accumulation of dust could be a problem and they might need to come up with ways of periodically cleaning the sensors. The vehicles taking part in the 2005 Grand Challenge would also have been exposed to dust, but only for a few hours, whereas these vehicles will be working for much longer periods of time.
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