11/16/2020 Off-highway autonomy

Autonomy takes off-highway

2020-10-23 RYAN GEHM
Integrating automation systems can increase safety and productivity
in the field and bring significant economic benefits.

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Autonomous opera on for on-highway commercial vehicles has grabbed headlines

and public a en on, righ ully so since these haulers increasingly will share the
roads with passenger vehicles. But there is a lot of interes ng new core work
occurring in the off-highway autonomy space as well, according to Brendan Chan,
chief engineer of unmanned systems and ac ve safety at Oshkosh Corp.

“There’s the hub-to-hub stuff that everyone’s been talking about. There’s also a lot
of geofence, low-speed applica ons where autonomy could be very useful and a
very good value,” Chan said at the 2020 SAE COMVEC Digital Summit. Vehicles for
yard maneuvering is one such applica on.

Mining and agriculture are two off-highway sectors where automated systems have
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proven effec ve and adop on is growing. Controlled environments and private

property where regula ons are less restric ve are driving factors. “The military is
interested in autonomous systems as well, primarily as force mul pliers and for
occupant safety,” said Chan. “There is quite a lot of synergy in the autonomy space
although the applica on may be different. It all boils down to the use case and the
opera onal design domain.”

Value proposi on
What the mining sector is lacking, despite working on autonomy for the last 15 to
20 years, is that most of the autonomous systems are OEM-driven, closed and
proprietary, said Prachi Vakharia, head of alliances and strategic partnerships at
Milpitas, California-based SafeAI.

The mining industry can learn three things, in par cular, from the passenger-vehicle
side, Vakharia shared during the COMVEC session. First, working more closely with
Tier 1 suppliers is vital. Building an ecosystem of partnerships is another beneficial
prac ce, she said, referencing the Ford and Volkswagen collabora on to co-invest in
Argo AI and its self-driving system. “The OEMs are working together in this; they're
not all building their own autonomy solu ons independent of each other,” she said.

The third point is the robust startup ecosystem that exists with on-highway CVs and
passenger vehicles. “These companies have made so many advances in autonomy,”
Vakharia said. “They’re using the best in AI [ar ficial intelligence] and machine
learning. They are using and crea ng some of the best hardware that’s possible.”

SafeAI is trying to change this model by supplying an open, interoperable

autonomous so ware pla orm with “industry-specific AI” that can be retrofi ed to
exis ng mining and construc on equipment. “Only 3 percent of mobile equipment
at any mine today is autonomous,” Vakharia said. “So that tells you there’s a huge
gap to be filled.”

Taking its own advice, SafeAI announced on October 22 a partnership with

Japanese construc on company Obayashi Corp. to operate an autonomous
Caterpillar 725 ar culated dump truck on a Silicon Valley test site beginning
November 2020. The Cat 725 will demonstrate load-haul-dump cycles. The pilot
program is a precursor to the companies crea ng autonomous construc on sites
around the world.

S ll, mining will see autonomy in produc on “much sooner” than on-highway
applica ons and even before construc on, according to Vakharia. “The opera onal
design domain is much simpler. But the other thing is the value proposi on is simply
much stronger, especially for mines,” she said.

Fleets can benefit with shorter cycle mes and the need for fewer vehicles. Vakharia
cited data showing that haul-truck produc vity can increase by about 21% due to
increased u liza on. Fuel consump on can be lowered by 6%, and re wear
improved by 7.5%. Autonomous-haul trucks can have a 49% a er-tax internal rate
of return including labor savings. And of course, improved safety is part of the
equa on.

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“There are about 200,000 safety incidents that are reported in the U.S. at mines,
and they want to drama cally reduce this number,” she said. “So, you can move
people out of hazardous condi ons and also add value to their jobs by giving them
more high-skill jobs, where they’re managing machines and doing less-repe ve
tasks.”

Mixed ecosystem
Strategic partnerships are important to advance autonomy in agriculture as well. A
pairing revealed in mid-October sees Kubota and California-based Nvidia teaming to
develop fully automated and unmanned agricultural machinery.

Kubota tractors will be equipped with Nvidia’s end-to-end AI pla orm, including
graphics processing units and ar ficial intelligence coupled with cameras. “This will
contribute to the sustainability of Japanese agriculture, where [the] agricultural
popula on con nues to decline,” Kubota posted on LinkedIn.

This partnership follows the unveiling earlier this year of Kubota’s “dream tractor.”
The X Tractor electric crawler concept obtains and evaluates environmental data
such as terrain, weather condi ons and growth rates to choose the appropriate
opera on. The data can be shared automa cally with other machines at the site for
more efficient opera on.

Agricultural machinery is a major focus of CNH Industrial’s autonomous-

development ac vi es as well. Bre McClelland, product manager focused on
autonomy and precision agriculture at CNH industrial, stated that much discussion
gets focused around the final embodiment of autonomy. “However, one of the
bigger challenges that doesn’t get as much air me in our off-road space is this
progression towards autonomy,” he said, adding that there are many meaningful
operator-assist steps along the way to SAE Level 5 autonomy.

“What we’re finding is that you have to push subsystem automa on so far and make
these machines so capable of monitoring their own health, their own performance,
that along the way you can actually deliver these back to the customers as
simplifica ons,” McClelland explained at the COMVEC Digital Summit. “If you can
take a system where today it requires mul ple inputs from the operator, either
through a touchscreen or pedals or switches, and you can turn that into something
like a one-bu on click to go, not only have you prepared your machine and your
subsystems for autonomy, you’ve also streamlined and improved the experience for
the customer.”

Another challenge is managing the “mixed ecosystem” that likely will persist for
decades before en re fleets convert to full autonomy. Manned and unmanned
vehicles will operate in the same fields o en in proximity, so companies must
consider how to make this environment manageable for farmers.

“There’s a combina on of tools that we provide customers today to manage these

manned vehicles, typically a combina on of in-cab technology and then cloud or
web technology,” he explained. “But in this future paradigm, you have to provide not
only controls and visualize data for that machine, you have to visualize it for the
whole team.
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“And then outside of the field of opera on, today we tradi onally provide cloud
telemetry type solu ons. Ul mately, those have to evolve as well,” McClelland
noted. “So, I expect this to drive a lot of change in how we provide some of these
services in the near future.”

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