Robot excavators and other equipment held big promise for heavy equipment makers—like self-driving cars, the technology has proven difficult to perfect.
When will those trials lead to autonomous construction machinery doing real work on construction sites? “We'll get there,” Weiss says, but Caterpillar’s partners need to be comfortable with the technology’s maturity. “There are risks involved, and we're on that journey, learning with them as we go, so that when we are commercially ready, they’re ready and comfortable with the product.”
Caterpillar, along with startup Teleo, argues that the road to fully autonomous construction sites must first go through a phase where semi-automated equipment is operated remotely, by workers elsewhere. In this development stage, 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.
An excavator without a cabin for a human operator looks striking, says Anthony Levandowski, CEO of startup Pronto.ai, but he predicts such machines are still “very, very far away” from widespread use.
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