Florida construction company Tomahawk Construction has retrofit its articulated dump trucks (ADTs) with Teleo’s Supervised Autonomy, citing an ongoing labor shortage: “We really have just had a hard time getting people into haul trucks,” said Scott Lyons, owner, in a statement.
Teleo builds autonomous technology for heavy equipment and provided a viable solution to address Tomahawk’s labor shortage, according to the company. Teleo retrofits any make, model and year of heavy equipment with its technology that enables remote and autonomous operations of the machines.
Teleo’s technology, called Supervised Autonomy, allows Tomahawk machine operator Max Bogacz to remotely operate three Teleo-equipped articulated dump trucks (ADTs) on the Naples job site, simultaneously, from a command center 40 miles away in Fort Myers.
Read also: Can Supervised Autonomy Fix the Operator Shortage?
“I am the first operator in the world to run multiple articulated dump trucks at once,” said Bogacz in a statement.
While the ADTs are set to autonomous mode, they can perform routine and repetitive tasks on their own, like hauling materials from one point to another. If there are any complex tasks that the autonomous technology cannot yet fully handle, the machine waits for the operator and Bogacz is there to take over. Bogacz switches between machines with the press of a button.
“Ever since we have installed Teleo units on the trucks, we haven't had one sitting,” said Lyons. “It lets us expand who we would typically hire for a haul truck. So today we'll see one operator per three trucks.
