When Tomahawk Construction owner Scott Lyons couldn’t find enough haul truck operators for a large development project in Naples, Florida, he turned to technology to solve his labor challenge.
“I told all the OEM manufacturers that I wanted an autonomous option,” Lyons said. “Teleo has really given us the only option to date to make it happen.” Teleo retrofits any make, model and year of heavy equipment with its technology for remote and autonomous operation.
[Watch: Retrofitting Equipment for Remote Control: An Interview with Teleo’s CEO]
Lyons is the first to deploy Teleo’s autonomous capabilities on an active jobsite – and his employee, Max Bogacz, is the first operator in the world to run multiple articulated dump trucks at once.
The technology, called Teleo Supervised Autonomy, lets Bogacz run three Teleo-retrofitted articulated dump trucks on the Naples jobsite, simultaneously, from a command center 40 miles away in Fort Myers.
When set in autonomous mode, the trucks can perform repetitive tasks on their own, like tramming materials from one point to another. For more complex tasks, like pulling up next to the excavator or dumping materials, Bogacz takes over. At his command station, Bogacz can switch between the three trucks at the press of a button.
The autonomous feature is on three of Tomahawk’s trucks and will be rolled out to 12 machines over the next few months.
“Ever since we have installed Teleo units on the trucks, we haven’t had one sitting,” noted Lyons. “It lets us expand who we would typically hire for a haul truck. So today, we’ll see one operator per three trucks.”
The land Tomahawk is developing is the future home of Caymas Naples, a luxury community of 457 single-family homes by Stock Development. Set on 780 acres, the community features a 12-acre amenity campus, 280 acres of lakes and 270 acres of onsite preserves. As part of the development, Tomahawk will excavate and move more than 2.2 million cubic yards of material from the Naples jobsite, a former mining operation.
To watch the operation in action, check out the video below:
[Related: “One Operator, Multiple Machines” – Teleo Exec’s Construction Tech Forecast]
