April 2023

Autonomous heavy-duty mobile machines: Why and how can we use them in construction sites?

From manual to automatic material flow based on machine productivity in construction sites

In this newsletter, we want to discuss how fleets of (semi)autonomous Heavy-Duty Mobile Machines (HDMMs) could be used not only to complete a construction project, but to accomplish that in an optimal way. Optimization is essential to improve productivity and efficiency and reduce cost and project time. Nowadays, manual methods are employed to allocate tasks to construction machines based on the experience of worksite managers and manual observation of operations. However, these methods are costly, error prone, and depend on few experts that must always be available. Automating task planning and assignment based on fleet productivity can be a promising solution for solving the above challenges and achieving optimality. Firstly, Amirmasoud will describe how to estimate the productivity of a fleet of HDMMs during earth-moving tasks; secondly, Paolo will focus on optimizing the performance of the fleet of autonomous machines by solving task planning, task assignment, motion planning, and coordination problems jointly.

Articles

• Productivity Monitoring
  What is the productivity, and how can it be calculated?
• Material flow coordination and optimization
  Let the robots build it