Cutting it fine with sat-nav dozer guidance

Setting rovers on the South of Shamka construction site.

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Some time ago, we debated what the future might hold if automation really took over in a big way.

We found the subject so fascinating, we took a look at what could be the future of mechanised construction – and we found the concept of autonomous robotic bulldozers was not as chilling as we first thought. Here, we revisit the sites to find out what ‘total control’ really means.The question is, how do such machines work at all, and what advantage can they offer?

Simply put, total control is a system where a site is first ‘staked’ by using GPS Rovers. These devices consist of a rod, a reciver and a computer. The rod holds the receiver on top and it has a ‘point’ at the bottom, while the electronics sit in the middle. There is usually a handheld device, which looks like some kind of industrial PDA, which tells an operator what the whole system is doing.

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HIGH STAKES
Once the ‘stakes’ have been set, the data is loaded onto a computer with the surveyor’s original drawings. These are then passed to the computers, via radio, in the heavy machinery.

The on-board computers can be fully 3D, or they can display the information in two dimensions, or even just as a string of lights, depending on which system has been ordered. Machines that can benefit from total control include not only ‘dozers and graders, but also excavators and even road compactors.

To put this to the test, we visited a large building site in the desert, some 50 kilometres outside Abu Dhabi island. The site, named South of Shamka on completion will comprise of ten thousand new villas, taking up no less than seventeen million square meters. Currently at the groundworks stage, operations have been split between Tristar Contracting and Bin Nawi Contracting. It is the latter that we are visiting today.

When a project covers this kind of surface area, the exact location of the heavy equipment can be a difficult thing to establish, which is where GPS technology comes in.

Smaller sites can get away with using regular surveying equipment, such as the now-common five-second Total Station, but with this amount of ground to cover the contactor decided to try a package from electronics firm Topcon.

Initially, this comprised of a system fitted to two bulldozers, with a base station and a ‘rover’ – another device which clamps to the side of a car for taking readings on the move. The contractor has just put in an order for a further four systems for bulldozers and some for motor graders, which should be extra suitable for fine grading, as the company has just bought several of the new electro-mechanical Cat 14M machines.