Evolutions of the Connected Jobsite: The Future of Compact Equipment

The road to the Connected Jobsite was the focus of a recent CONEXPO-CON/AGG Tech Talk, part of the show’s new 75,000-square-foot Tech Experience featuring future-looking innovations that shape manufacturing.

Hosted by Joel Honeyman, vice president of innovation at Bobcat and Doosan Company, the presentation looked at three evolutions to take place in construction in the next 10 years – connected awareness, connected performance and connected control – and how adapting to each allows for coordinated, safe, efficient and precise operation.

Connected awareness

Construction professionals must be connected to each of their jobsites in order to know what’s happening at any given moment. But, the inability to be in several places at once presents a challenge, especially for those overseeing multiple projects. Fleet management systems enabled by telematics and wearables connect every piece of equipment into one platform so that construction managers have a view to all equipment on their sites.

“They won’t know just what equipment is being operated and how it’s being operated, they’ll know the characteristics of the operators,” Honeyman said. “Did they show up? How efficient were they? Were they fatigued? Did they take too many breaks?”

All of these things will be tracked and traced in fleet management in one system, providing logistical savings, eliminating redundancy and maximizing uptime.

Connected performance

Strengthening business intelligence to estimate jobs more easily provides greater efficiencies, predictable costs and consistent profits. Cylinder sensing technology, for example, lets workers measure actual tonnage removed, how much soil has been removed, placed and more. The jobsite will get smarter, too, as utilities and underground objects can be seen live by the operator in the cab of his machine.

Connected control

Leveraging autonomous machines and augmented reality can provide construction professionals with precise operations, cost certainty, specialization and maximized productivity. Think about how many trade-offs are made in design today simply for safety and comfort of an operator. If there’s no operator, machines will be designed differently.

The machines of the future will provide safety benefits, too. Not only will they detect imperfections, but they’ll avoid them and dig precisely alongside them to ensure there are no accidents.

What about those unique tasks that still require a skilled operator? That’s where AR plays a role by giving operators the ability to visualize the features, elevations and grade of a project site right from the window of their machines.

Connectivity is about information. The more construction professionals know – about their machines, their operations, the jobsite and the operators — the more they can do and the more efficiently they can do it. The full CONEXPO-CON/AGG Tech Talk schedule can be found here.