When will those tests lead to autonomous construction machinery doing real work on construction sites? “We’ll get there,” Weiss says, but Caterpillar partners need to be comfortable with the maturity of the technology. “There are risks involved, and we’re on that journey, learning with them as we go, so that when we’re commercially ready, they’re ready and comfortable with the product.”
Weiss says that Caterpillar started working on automating mining operations and construction sites around the same time, more than a decade ago, but automation happened faster in mines for a number of reasons.
First, the mines have semi-permanent pathways, and being underground allows you to safely secure the area. And since mines are typically in remote locations where it’s hard to house and feed people, automation may be more appealing. By contrast, construction sites are often short-lived and constantly changing, with no permanent pathways.
Caterpillar, along with startup Teleo, argues that the path to fully autonomous construction sites must first go through a phase where semi-automated equipment is operated remotely by workers in other locations. At this stage of development, people with the necessary training can work with semi-autonomous machines anywhere in the world using an interface that resembles a video game, potentially even working from home. In parallel, AI experts will identify repetitive tasks suitable for automation.
Today’s heavy machine operators may choose to use some limited automation features, such as auto-leveling to make surfaces flat when using a dozer. But the goal, says Caterpillar chief engineer Michael Murphy, is to allow one person to simultaneously operate four or five machines at once by letting algorithms do much of the work.
Caterpillar equipment in today’s automation experiments resembles conventional machinery. However, Volvo and Bobcat’s parent company, Doosan, which committed to will commercialize its Concept-X autonomous project by 2025they are already designing machines without cabins where a human operator sits.
Volvo Autonomous Solutions head of communications Ceren Wende says the company has a unique truck without cab working in a limestone quarry in Switzerland and seven autonomous trucks in a mine in Norway, but no autonomous heavy equipment operating on construction sites.
An excavator with no cab for a human operator looks appealing, says Anthony Levandowski, CEO of startup Pronto.ai, but he predicts that such machines are still “a very, very long way” from widespread use.
Levandowski was once a founding member of the cheer team and predicted that self-driving cars would soon take over. Before plead guilty to taking confidential information of Google’s Waymo self-driving division (and received a pardon from former President Trump), helped catalyze the automated driving industry when, in 2008, he programmed an autonomous Prius to drive across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge ( with a police escort) to deliver a pizza.
“I was like, ‘I think we’re about two years away from having this marketable,’” Levandowski says. “That was 15 years ago.” Today, he believes that driverless cars have been left behind. Soon, like Caterpillar, it focuses on automating trucks that travel predetermined routes in mines and quarries.
Although the trucks can weigh more than 100 tons, it is significantly easier than autonomous driving on public roads, because the vehicles operate on simpler private road networks. Employees receive training on how to behave and what to expect around the autonomous machines.
Levandowski says Pronto isn’t working on building automation. He expects progress to be modest in the next few years, taking on simpler tasks such as self-grading with a bulldozer and tankers to remove dust.
Built CEO Noah Ready-Campbell says his company’s research and development efforts are now focused on robotic pile driving, despite the company’s history with automating dozers, skid steers and excavators. Although the company demonstrated that it was possible to dig trenches with automated excavators, it ran into obstacles trying to convince customers to adopt automation. “You have to solve a big enough pain point to spur adoption,” Ready-Campbell says. “People will only change their behavior if it’s worth it.”