The “Big Three” are making ground these days, globally and especially in North America.
No, not automakers GM, Ford, and Chrysler, but three big automaters, that is, suppliers of GPS-driven digging controls: Topcon, Trimble, and Leica.
Though they’re not household names, a growing number of their hard- and software products are now installed on fleets of graders, excavators, and dozers–and they’re making the grade with users. Especially within the past few years these remarkable tools are carving out an ever-expanding space across construction landscapes; contractors who buy in are gaining business away from competitors who remain entrenched in manually driven machinery.
As the following report discusses, the heavy-equipment automation field is prospering in a marketplace that is also nicely synced with the current recovery in construction. Earth-moving contractors who weathered bad times and a post-2009 shakeout are generally enjoying steadier workloads -and well able to justify an investment in machines that literally “drive themselves.”
As a representative of one of the Three puts it, contractor adoption of automated controls “is tremendous,” these days, says Gerard Lamarre, segment sales manager for machine control in Canada for Leica Geosystems. He notes: “Contractors really see the value of it. They can get jobs done in a higher rate of speed because of the correction factor, and with fewer passes because it’s more accurate. The blade is actually grading a lot more accurately and moving much more material,” says Lamarre, who began in the construction field as a surveyor in 1979.
Another market observer who sells the equipment, Scott Beathard, finds that auto-digging “is now becoming accepted technology, and we are expanding rapidly in every category and in every region.” Beathard is president and CEO of GeoShack North America, Inc., the largest Topcon dealer worldwide and probably the largest dealer of all machine controls, anywhere. Topcon is considered number one of the Big Three.
Beathard also observes that there’s a newer boom in repeat business: “Easily 50% of our sales of machine controls today are to existing users,” he says.
Echoing Beathard, a vendor of software that supports this automation in the preparatory modeling stage, Steve Warfle, reports: “Customers are coming out of woodwork, saying “˜Oh my God, we need an upgrade yesterday! Lots of people are seeing the features in the software and saying, “˜I’ve got to get this. How fast can I get a license?” Warfle represents a designing and schematics product suite called InSite Sitework. Properly speaking, it’s not an automation tool, but the advent of GPS-guided controls has spawned a thriving niche of related services and software programs like those of InSite (see sidebar). Among InSite’s most successful and critically important products for digging efficiency is a tool that can do vector-based takeoff drawings straight from a PDF file, saving countless hours of prep time in the office.
Automation Yields Concrete Results
What this transformative lineup actually does for machines is to enable their obedience to precise digital digging instructions for completing a jobsite assignment, from ground-breaking to final grade, in record time.
No longer must an operator steer precariously amidst a grid of wooden ground stakes, hoping he doesn’t run over or miss seeing one, and eyeballing his blade nervously for proper height adjustments. Instead, the “driver” and decision-maker at the controls, doing all the careful “thinking” for him, is an automaton.
In a manner that almost feels like a futuristic sci-fi flick, big machines traverse the terrain in coordinated fashion, rather eerily driving themselves along, hands-free. A relaxed human operator sits at the control panel and monitors the software’s progress reports. Tasks are done with super-human precision and speed.
Naturally, there are profitable and highly desirable results of such an achievement.
Most obviously, the contractor can produce more work with less equipment and staff.
Secondly, the occasional shortcomings that crop up in casual, old-school surveying or engineering plots are filtered-out early by the discipline that automation imposes. (And to some extent, notes one observer, professional surveyor functions are replaced or automated outright by the new 3D modeling software.)
Lastly, contractors’ experiences with profit-gobbling errors in site work, design misinterpretations, or operator blunders are utterly minimized, by virtue of automation.
Together with such improved performance in accuracy comes faster speed. When executing their programmed digging instructions properly, “In the first year,” suggests Lamarre, “you’re going to see about a 30% increase of productivity on jobs, or of controlling costs on jobs. That’s a rule of thumb. Some companies implement new technologies better than others, so it could range from 15 to 45%,” he adds.
GeoShack’s Beathard concurs and offers similar figures. “You will see a minimum of a 30% and as much as a 100% increase in productivity,” he says. “You do that by getting to grade faster and eliminating superfluous passes. The average contractor and average machine in a traditional situation will pass over a location on a site about 12 times to get to grade. With machine control you’ll get to grade in half that many passes, sometimes less.”
First costs for equipment are also plummeting, and payback on the investment is arriving quickly. Half a dozen years ago, machine control required a minimum $150,000 investment per machine-a price tag that was affordable only for large contractors and road building companies. Now the average cost is at least half that amount, with many enthusiastic buyers. “An excavator equipped with a $70,000 investment in GPS control, running steadily, could probably pay for itself by the end of the first season,” Lamarre notes
Similarly, Matt Gebarowski, President of a Portland, Oregon automation tech firm for contractors called Dirt Logic, recounts that “About ten years ago, nobody was going to spend $50,000 or $100,000 for this equipment and infrastructure. Just for the base station and data collection I think the cost was about $25,000. The perception was that these are only for working on projects of 25 acres or more. Now it seems everybody is stepping up to GPS and machine control. I’ve seen a lot of contractors coming back and willing to work much smaller sites from just two to five acres using machine control.”
Besides price and payback, another reason auto-digging has grown so popular, Gebarowski continues, is that the technology and software have obviously gotten steadily better (as outlined just below). A third is that the range of usability has expanded to include virtually any-sized project: “They’re using it for anything from a Jack-in-the-Box to a large mall complex,” he notes. “Once they get it, they really like it and they are asking, “˜Why didn’t we do this five years ago?'”
A fourth virtue is the contribution to solving labor skill shortages; Gebarowski illustrates by noting that surveyors are dwindling in numbers precariously, and work crew must sometimes sit idly at jobsites, incurring expensive downtime until someone shows up. But the advent of automation and pre-assembled data readily solves this. “A lot of contractors are being kind of forced to take on this technology by necessity,” he says, to fill the data-provisioning gaps.
Summarizing it all, Beathard routinely tells digging contractors: “There is nothing you can invest in that will give higher ROI than GPS-based machine control. It will absolutely help you do things better, faster and cheaper. There is nothing else like it.”
Market penetration for GPS-controlled digging, although rapidly growing for these past few years, is still rather slim. Beathard observes: “Nobody knows the figure for sure, but there’s a general consensus that it’s probably somewhere in the 15 to 25% range.”
This refers to GPS control adoption; there’s somewhat greater prevalence of earlier automation technologies that have already been around for two decades or more, and are still part of the operational mix.
2D on a 3D Matrix
Here, a quick recap of technology evolution may be helpful.
Lamarre recalls the time in the 1990s when machine control robotics, not unlike those installed at factories and along assembly lines, were first applied to drive heavy machines that were digging and grading the landscape. Back in this period, Leica became the third manufacturer of the Three to introduce a robotic technology for digging. Lamarre describes it working as, “A prism which we set on equipment. And we follow and track it with a toll station. It’s very accurate, to within ten millimeters.”
In about the same time frame, sonic sensors came trundling along. These employed reflective sonar ground signals to guide the cutting blade. Topcon was the first to introduce them. There soon followed another guidance method, using lasers. Leica Geosystems helped pioneer this latter technology in the late 1990s, Lamarre notes of the 124-year old Swiss optics company.
Those early laser and sonic tools are referred to these days as 2D (two-dimensional) technologies. Before GPS came along, robotic, sonic, and laser technologies became extremely popular over the past dozen years. Sonic and laser guidance “can independently “˜feel’ the grading surface,” and thus self-adjust automatically, says Lamarre. “You’re basically holding cross-slope,” with a grader using sonic controls, for example. All Leica systems have a slope sensor, he notes, “so we can always adjust the blade to designed cross slopes out there”¦Our GPS receiver on the machine checks the position of the blade according to surface and adjusts the blade height at all times.”
He’s referring here to location-giving signals beaming from the satellites high overhead. This adds horizontal (northing and easting) dimension, giving GPS the designation of a 3D control, as 2D control designates height and slope.
For concrete paving, 3D with robotic control is a very accurate solution, Lamarre notes.
Fully automatic operation down to tolerances of plus-or-minus ten millimeters is achievable, he adds.
Topcon’s construction software business development manager Mark Larranaga notes that the latest generation Millimeter GPS laser tool uses “a fan beam with a vertical range up to 33 feet,” and provide the guidance system continuous correction. It achieves a level of fine resolution roughly the size of a golf ball; again, at this level it enables automation all the way to final grade.
The Software Drivers
Besides installing 2D or 3D hardware, you usually need 3D modeling software and related tools for guidance, control and analysis.
Models help verify, for example, the accuracy of data inputs before you launch your fleet to attack a hillside. Raw data from engineers’ drawings and paper instructions is imported into the modeling program.
These days, virtually every highway is built from a 3D control model, driving an automated grader, Lamarre points out.
Again, with such potential speed and high performance the accuracy of the input data is more critical than ever. This requirement has spawned a specialized support role for consultants and products which assist in this phase. Would-be adopters of automation would do well to get acquainted with them (again, see sidebar).
Over the past decade or so since the introduction of integrated GPS-steered, software-driven automation, there’ve been several key technical milestones worth noting besides:
Multiple-Satellite Systems
Introduced by Topcon, this innovation brought into play the orbiting GPS resources of Russia and other nations. Topcon’s Larranaga explains the philosophy here: “We want to track the most satellites for potential redundancy that will protect production time.”
Stabilized Base Stations
“Base station” refers to a known single point of reference in a GPS grid, serving to unify reading positions. In the early days of GPS digging, each contractor established his own station(s) for a project or set of projects. This made for some instability, as Lamarre explains. “Either the general contractor or engineer would set up his own base, and every sub will then come in and set up own. You can understand there will be frictions as each guy says “˜mine is right, not yours,'” notes Lamarre.
Manufacturers developed improved solutions for much higher stability, based on using a common reference point. Geosystems’ “Smartnet,” for example, was launched primarily for surveyors, Lamarre recalls, and at first, “Nobody believed it would work for machine control.” Then in 2010 it was tied in with machines in Eastern Canada, and, finding tremendous success, this brought along the other competitors to emulate it there. Now, all of the Big Three provide permanent reference stations disseminated throughout much of the continent. And digging contractors no longer need be concerned about solitary stations going down.
Machines Made “GPS-Ready”
In the past few years heavy equipment manufacturers have been jumping onto automation enthusiastically by retooling and redesigning dozers, etc., and pre-wiring them for subsequent add-on equipment in the aftermarket.
This involves affixing “basic harnesses and electro-hydraulic valves that we can send electrical signals to adjust angle and move the work tool,” explains Caterpillar’s John Thomas. He is marketing and strategy manager for Caterpillar’s Construction Technology and Solutions group. Caterpillar now makes these valves standard equipment on every new tractor sold in North America and in the European Union, he notes. Lacking them would add many thousands of dollars to the cost of your parts and labor in the aftermarket. You would also incur the risk of damaging your conventional hydraulics if they’re altered improperly.
GeoShack’s Beathard reports that, so far, equipment made by John Deere, Komatsu, Volvo, Liebert, and CASE is all sold with the factory option to be rendered “Topcon-ready.”
Topcon’s Larranaga calls this trend “a great move by manufacturers of iron”¦ They’ve put on systems to make them ready for plug-and-play, so you can go and align a positioning system”¦ without having to spend a lot of time putting in cabling and replacing valves.”
Beathard says his shop still has to mount the GPS automation device, then measure and calibrate it, “but installation goes from two days down to four hours” for him.
Not just “GPS-ready” machines are rolling out the factory doors, but so are third-party fully GPS equipped ones. This trend began at Deere and Komatsu, then Volvo in 2013, and CASE and Liebherr last year. Beathard notes that, beginning in 2012 Komatsu also introduced its own engineered system, built with a Topcon chip and GPS. Other machine makers may well follow suit someday.
Caterpillar’s Thomas adds that Caterpillar is planning significant GPS-related design changes for 2015, 2016, and 2017 models; some CAT excavators will feature 2D factory installed grade control systems, for example; the 323 and 336 hydraulic hybrid excavator will both have 2D grade control systems as standard ware.
Caterpillar is also partnering with Trimble, having inked its latest two agreements in 2009 and 2014. CAT machines are now optimized for CAT and Trimble gear, says Thomas, yet will remain non-exclusive and flexible to enable installation of Leica, Topcon, or other guidance products.
Gebarowski suggests that such partnering of major heavy equipment dealers with Big Three equippers “is really going to make the industry explode. It’s going to triple,” he says. “They’re already selling those things like crazy, but in the next five years there’s going to be nothing but machine control.” Dealerships and manufacturers alike will be scrambling even more to form alliances for competitive advantage, he predicts.
And Data Management, Business-Wide
Now that machines have been busily gnawing the earth with automated precision for several years, product developers have shifted to another strategic level: offering software not just to guide digging but to mine-away at operational data flowing from field to home-office and back.
GPS machines are already uplinked for two-way satellite communication. This occurs constantly and in real time. Just as readily, machines can be linked to a company network. So, all kinds of valuable information is now accessible. Shaping and massaging it with useful software can improve not only machine control but total project management and job profitability.
“This is the really big push now,” says Topcon’s Larranaga, mentioning his company’s Softlink 3D product for achieving it. The competitors’ counterparts are Trimble’s Business Center and Leica Geosystems’ iCON telematics. Lamarre describes the latter as “a telematics service where, basically, the office can download data to each of the company machines, and daily check what the machines are doing as the work occurs.” The telematics service is managed through a cellular network provider via a SIM card on each machine, much like smartphones.
Software functionality begins even before the digging, with preparatory refinement of the raw data from the surveyor or civil engineers (e.g., from CAD files or spreadsheet figures). The plan for digging is then rendered as a 3D model. Data is further translated into a file format that machines can use for digging.
Project experience reveals that digging instructions often must change in the job lifecycle. Updates of this sort can now be done smoothly and very quickly. Larranaga observes: “What’s neat about it is . . . once the update is completed, the necessary files for a project automatically get sent to all the machines that need that file,” via cellular modem.
Likewise, streaming back from the earth-movers you’ll see numbers on what’s happening with each machine and at each site-pretty much whatever’s pertinent: fuel levels, hours worked, production rates, dirt volumes moved, and specific dirt types. Larranaga notes: “This feeds into the company network that is accessible from multiple points, for use at the office or in the field, via laptop, notebook, or phone.”
Data can be further molded for help in scheduling, future estimating, bidding, and profitability projections.
The machine operator can also use the link to summon online tech support. As a driver sits at the control panel, says Larranaga, “You can show him the steps how to do it”¦ using any internet device The operator gains confidence and skills,” and downtime is reduced, he adds.
Beathard notes that SiteLink 3D allows him, as a support dealer, to connect via cell modem into a machine’s control box. He can then monitor operation and check cable connections and GPS signal status, etc., for basic trouble-shooting. This often eliminates the need for an in-person support visit.
Warfle also sees the live data linkage as “really great” for hands-on-style operator training in situ. He formerly used to have to arrange in-person teaching seminars, but now all instruction can be delivered online, wherever the operator happen to be perched. “We can also monitor students’ machines while we do presentation and they follow examples,” he adds. “If a student is not “˜getting it’ we can see his machine and help him along. A whole “˜classroom’ of students can interact with each other in real time. That’s really changed the industry, getting people trained and up to speed quickly.”
Larranaga sums up by noting that these systems have now moved beyond mere machine control “to complete project control. That’s really what we’re trying to do.”
What a Retrofit Might Cost You
Caterpillar’s Thomas offers helpful cost estimates on parts and labor in a retrofit scenario. “Adding a platform to a machine that will allow easy addition of grade controls,” he says, you should figure between $3,000 and $7,000 more on the equipment price.
“A factory-installed grade control solution will vary, depending on specific technology, starting at about $10,000 for a basic gravity-based system,” he says.
Installing lasers on the gravity-based system, for an excavator (say), would add between $5,000 and $15,000.
As for the cost of an aftermarket installation versus factory-installed, these two should come out very close, he says, assuming the aftermarket machine is “GPS-ready,” as described above, or at least equipped with electro-hydraulic valves.
As for the return on investment, “Customers typically realize a six-to-twelve-month payback on the investment in these systems, depending on the technology,” he adds.
One difference, though, is that in the aftermarket your vendor will need to spend time calibrating and testing under work conditions, in relation to the GPS antenna and grid.
Thomas believes that aftermarket orders will continue to boom, due to a snowballing effect as more and more contractors witness the benefits of automation and seek retrofits even for aging dozers.
Beathard suggests that for a GPS retrofit or your fleet, starting from scratch, “You’re looking at $100,000 ballpark, total, just for that first system that would be fully automatic.” However, as of 2013 there’s now a bare-bones GPS “indicate system,” he says, sold by Topcon. It brings the price per machine, down to roughly $30,000. This compares with $60,000 each, just a couple of years ago. The no-frills model includes only machine-mounted components and no base station or ancillary systems. Nevertheless, “A lot of contractors have been waiting for this opportunity,” he says. “They’ve already got the full-blown automatic systems on their primary grading machines and dozers. Now we see them coming back in and putting a lower-cost indicate system on their scrapers and large earthmoving equipment”-so, ultimately, on the whole fleet.
“Now,” he continues, “the rough-grade scrapers, instead of just following the lead dozer all the time, are given some independence. This gives a contractor freer control on every machine,” he says.
What’s Holding You Back?
Lastly, a few parting thoughts about the practical and psychological barriers that are still keeping 70 or 80% of contractors from buying-in to automation. How can reluctance be overcome? And how can a new adopter be assured of a successful implementation?
Several commentators point, first of all, to a natural conservatism found in smaller contracting businesses-the “If-it-ain’t—busted-don’t-fix-it” sentiment. Business is going well; why should we stick our necks out and perhaps risk a costly failure?
A key problem here is that non-automated contractors don’t yet seem to realize that their real vulnerability isn’t the break-in period, but competitors who are already far down road to automated productivity. The latter will grow their businesses and increase in numbers until, eventually, the laggards will be out-bid and out of business.
GeoShack’s Beathard suggests that the apprehensions felt by new adopters are not entirely unjustified. Although the products themselves “are very reliable and well-tested,” he says, success with them depends on mastering the change-process and scaling the learning-curve successfully. He adds: “Machine control will do things exactly correctly if you set it up right-and exactly incorrectly if you set it up wrong.”
GeoShack, as the largest dealer of guidance products, has introduced “tiered service and increase training” in recent years, “designed to take the fear out” of an implementation, notes Beathard. New adopters will benefit from an extensive and rapidly growing knowledge-base that dealers can bring.
As for specific issues and challenges that arise most frequently among newcomers, Beathard lists several. In first place: “Getting accurate 3D model control-points.” Here, a most common glitch is having control-points or the related data-models come out wrong. Conversely, though, “If the data model and control-points are correct and you can tie into it, everything is usually good,” and auto-digging will likely proceed smoothly, he says.
Data acquisition, validation and modeling occur early-on, so you should focus a lot of attention here, he advises. Otherwise, “What usually happens is you figure-out in the field something went wrong.” Not good. That’s the expensive way. “There are all kinds of scenarios that can make the model incorrect,” he continues. “Do your best to ferret them out in advance.” Have your own contractor superintendent or business owner review the model as well.
If the hardware dealer cannot refer you to experienced consultants or provide help directly, cultivate such third-party relationships yourself.
Beathard offers similar advice about management of people and events in sequence, during the implementation: prepare for adequate training time for operators; plan for negative contingencies like key staff turn-over; and organize your worksite setup and GPS localization there. Examine your dealers’ solutions to each of these issues and others, he suggests.
Lamarre observes that, once GPS is working successfully, clients soon come to depend on models as their ultimate “security.” But he cautions them to retain their critical faculties towards automation and modeling and such. “Some models are good and some are bad,” he says. “And a model could have been a good originally, but the engineer made a mistake [during work in progress] or simply fouled up [when updating it] in the last day. The operator finished his grade and he was on grade; but next morning, he’s got a new file delivered, and suddenly he’s told he needs to dig two more feet. He knows it’s wrong. So,” advises Lamarre, “you cannot just deny that feeling and simply “˜do what the model says’ anyway, and dig two extra feet.”
He continues: “You still need to check, and use your common sense on the jobsite. I tell operators and surveyors, “˜We put a computer on those machines-but the best computer you have is your own head. If something doesn’t look right to you, even though machine says its good, you should double-check it.'”
As a final thought, Lamarre points to a certain inevitability about contractors embracing machine automation.
“These days,” he says, “We can say that every contractor out there, whether small, mid-sized or large, knows that if they don’t have machine control yet, they will get it someday.”
It’s only a question of when.
He concludes: “The moment of decision really comes down to picking the right project for making the start: A good work contract with a workload sufficient to amortize the investment…”
Then get ready to take the plunge.
