The World's Heaviest Robot 142
Roland Piquepaille writes "This distinction goes to a future autonomous version of the 700-tons Caterpillar mining truck. In this article, Discovery News reports that Caterpillar engineers and computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up to develop this autonomous truck. Japan-based Komatsu has already delivered autonomous mining trucks to its customers, but these are smaller than the Caterpillar ones. Both companies are transforming their trucks into 'robots' for three reasons. Improvements in safety, efficiency and productivity will reduce costs and increase availability."
240 tons? (Score:1, Informative)
The payload of a 797B is rated at 380 tons and they can carry an overload of 450 tons without too much of a sweat.
Re:Transformers (Score:3, Informative)
I believe that was a Constructicon, not an Autobot ... (specifically "Long Haul" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructicon)
Re:Quick, tag this 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I'm thinking about the truck going on a rampage killing multiple people in the vicinity. Awesome.
These kind of machines [wikipedia.org] are incredibly slow.
Re:Heaviest at a mere 700T? (Score:3, Informative)
2.4km at 75km/h means it will take about 2 minutes to pass a crossing. At half speed, it's still only 4 minutes.
Source for figures: im-mining.com [im-mining.com]
Only having two engines just means it takes a long time to get up to speed.
Re:Heaviest at a mere 700T? (Score:4, Informative)
"Driverless" is a better term. Train drivers for Rio and BHP are very expensive and their rosters are very inflexible, which hampers production. It's a hangover from the union days.
Re:Quick, tag this 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' (Score:5, Informative)
My old man drives a 797 at a coal mine in Central Queensland - top speed unloaded is 60km/hr.
I don't define that as "incredibly slow", as it's a damn sight faster than you can run.
Got a photo around here somewhere of him and his truck- he's 6ft tall, and standing next to the truck, his hard-hat is level with halfway up the hub of the front tyre.
Top speed loaded is 40km/hr, but that is because the tyres cannot take the higher speeds - they overheat and blow. When a tyre is $35,000 and it blows, that's not good. When it's pumped to it's normal pressure of 130PSI and the truck is parked anywhere near people when it goes off, that's definitely very,very bad.
Considering the inertia involved, they are pretty much unstoppable by cars, buildings,etc if at speed - they will mow right over the top of your average 4x4 and not even notice. A guy where he works ran over an (empty) Toyota Landcruiser troop carrier one night - swung around in a loop to dump, backed up towards the face, felt a bump "like coming up against a little ridge of dirt" (his words) , put the foot down a little, reverse to face, dump load, drive forward a little, get out of the cab for a smoke, look down in front of the truck.... what's that down near the front wheel? Oh, crap.
But anyway, I've worked on more autonomous stuff than this.
Sandvik (and Cat) have systems for underground mines that are pretty much fully autonomous. Sandvik and their Toro loaders can do a full circuit in auto, driving using laser rangefinders to map the walls, update their location on an internal map and basically do all the work except actually dig the bucket of ore. They do traffic control (one loader waits for another at intersections), collision avoidance, the whole shebang.
So one guy can operate three or four loaders at once, as all he does is take control of a loader at the ore pile, dig a bucket, then set it loose to go and dump that load automatically elsewhere. Meanwhile another loader turns up and sits idle at the ore pile waiting for him to take control. It's Management's wet dream - no need for trained underground operators on $55/hr, get some 17 year old in a control room on the surface at $20/hr running 4 loaders.
If ore wasn't so tricky to dig out (irregular sizing is the problem), they'd be full auto by now.
Re:Quick, tag this 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' (Score:3, Informative)
These kind of machines are incredibly [wikipedia.org] slow.
You obviously didn't RTFA.
So the real question is, did you even read the wikipedia article you linked?
FTFA: That's nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.
FTFWiki:
# Drive: 3524B Series, 24-cylinder, four-stroke diesel engine
# Max speed: 42 mph (67 km/h)
# Power: 3,550 hp (2,650 kW)
I don't consider 2 million pounds moving at 42 mph "incredibly slow"
Previous Slashdot Story (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't all that new...I submitted a story to Slashdot about a fully autonomous/tele-operated underground mine back in 2001! (Disclaimer, I was one of the engineers on the project.)
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/01/30/1552243.shtml [slashdot.org]
Re:Autonomous? (Score:1, Informative)
Theregister.co.uk has another article that states the winners of the Darpa challange are working on this with CAT. It is intended to be truly autonomous robot inside of their own area, only when interacting with human operated machines, and leaving or entering that auto area, for maintenance, will it become remote operated.
That said, anything being used for production is going to be overseen by humans to make sure it is meeting profit goals, etc. So ya their will be a manned office with a few people overseeing dozens to hundreds of robots.
AC since I have interests in the companys mentioned.
correction (Score:2, Informative)
TerraMax (Score:3, Informative)
Although the vehicle mentioned in the article is not a DARPA challenge setup, there was one competitor in the DARPA challenge that would be almost as intimidating if it went rogue:
- TerraMax [terramax.com]
Although the vehicle has had it's share of buggy moments, it's has done surprising well, especially considering it's sheer size.
Re:Transformers (Score:2, Informative)
Sense of scale.... (Score:3, Informative)
Or this video of a smaller 793, but I sure hope that is not an autonomous kill-bot [youtube.com].