Tyrone starts his secondment at KAMAG Transporttechnik GmbH & Co.KG

Tyrone, our MORE Early Stage Researcher 1, moved to KAMAG Transporttechnik GmbH & Co.KG located in Ulm, Germany for his secondment. Together with the SCHEUERLE Fahrzeugfabrik, NICOLAS Industrie and TIIGER, KAMAG Transporttechnik forms the TII Group – Transporter Industry International. The TII Group is the world’s market leader in the development and production of heavy-duty vehicles equipped with hydraulically-supported pendulum axles. KAMAG is active in the production of industrial vehicles, modular transporters and vehicles for terminal logistics.

Tyrone will work at KAMAG from 01.02.2022 until 31.05.2022. During this time, he will investigate new potential business cases and business models for automated and/or autonomous ‘Swap Body Transporters’ and ‘Terminal Tractors’ offered by KAMAG. The secondment will provide Tyrone with practical exposure and an avenue to test business and management related research concepts in the field of terminal/yard logistics, while KAMAG will benefit from the research insights that may help their future business and research collaborations.

First face-to-face industry training held in Tampere

The MORE project has been running for nearly two years and due to travel restrictions, all meetings and trainings up to now have been held virtually until today. We finally had the opportunity to meet in person for the first time from the 15th-17th November 2021. In total, 23 members from the MORE consortium including the eight Early Stage Researchers met up for the 3rd Industry training event organised by TAU in Tampere, Finland.

The three-day training event included presentations from invited external speakers on Robotics, manipulator, trajectory optimization (Arun Singh, Univ. of Tartu) and a number of MORE network members on a number of relevant topics covering Hydraulics boom (Marcus Rösth, HIAB), Forestry Applications and Technologies (Timo Käppi, J. Deere), BIM in Infra Construction (Teppo Viinikka, Novatron), Control of Articulated Hydraulic Robotic Systems, (Janne Koivumäki Novatron), Operator assistance (Manuel Bös, Liebherr), Robot learning for heavy mobile machines (Nataliya Strokina / Reza Ghabcheloo,TAU) and Automation, Robotics in heavy machines (Christine Brach/Ulrich Lenzgeiger, Bosch Rexroth)

We also had the opportunity to visit our local hosts’ labs and demonstrators. TAU to showcase Robots in action in our RoboLab Tampere https://research.tuni.fi/robolabtampere/ At the end of each day, we held roundtable session to discuss the technical topics which were presented during the day.  In these discussion academia and industry collaboration was intensively elaborated. Being able to meet in person has provided the MORE members the possibility to get to know each other on a much more personal level and to strengthen team spirit. We would like to thank all the contributors to the Industry Day and are looking forward to MORE!  

Presentation at FPMC 2021, “Towards a Standard Taxonomy for Levels of Automation in Heavy-Duty Mobile Machinery”

Our MORE Early Stage Researcher, Tyrone J. Machado presented a paper titled “Towards a Standard Taxonomy for Levels of Automation in Heavy-Duty Mobile Machinery” at the ASME/Bath Symposium on Fluid Power and Motion Control (FPMC) 2021. 

We noticed a lack of commonly accepted definitions and taxonomies for levels of automation (LOA) in the heavy-duty mobile machinery (HDMM) industry/community. They rely on SAE J3016 from the automotive industry, which is unsuitable for HDMM because HDMM perform working activities or manipulation of external materials, in addition to driving activities. Thus, we propose a new two dimensional LOA matrix concept, with manipulation LOA on one dimension, and driving LOA on another dimension. 

The conference was held virtually from 19 to 21 October 2021 and the recording from Tyrone’s presentation is available to watch below.

Presentation on Autonomous Heavy-Duty Mobile Machinery: A Multidisciplinary Collaborative Challenge by Tyrone J. Machado at IEEE-ICTE 2021

Tyrone held a presentation at the International Conference on Technology and Entrepreneurship IEEE-ICTE2021 in Track 6: Interconnected business models; open innovation in digital age; Digitalization of innovation, R&D and creativity processes held virtually from 24-27 August 2021. The paper titled “Autonomous Heavy-Duty Mobile Machinery: A Multidisciplinary Collaborative Challenge” was a joint effort by all the MORE Early Stage Researchers.

In the presentation, Tyrone introduces autonomous heavy-duty mobile machinery from a more general rather than technical perspective, and highlights the conceptual challenges that arise when transitioning from traditional machinery to autonomous machinery. The paper took a holistic and multidisciplinary view on the topic covering technical, economical and management perspectives.