Komatsu uses unmanned aerial vehicle to guide autopilot excavator
Komatsu, the world's second largest construction machinery manufacturer, is a 94 year old Japanese brand. It sells various kinds of building equipment to forklift, excavator and bulldozer to global customers. However, in the hometown of Japan, Komatsu is facing the dilemma of aging population, which makes it difficult to find enough labor force to operate its construction machinery.
Worrying is that Japan is currently building a new building to be busy at putting up installations in Japan in 2020 to greet the arrival of the Olympic games. Experts believe that there will be a series of obstacles in the process. "The shortage of labor in the construction industry will reach the level of crisis in the next few years," Martin Schulz, an economist at the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, told Bloomberg.
To cope with this problem, Komatsu has developed a new service called "intelligent construction", Smart Construction. In this service, unmanned excavators can dig rock or soil under the guidance of a team of unmanned aerial vehicles. The UAVs are plotting three-dimensional maps in the air and updating the data in real time to track how much soil or cement the excavators have dug.
The UAVs used by Komatsu are from the American start-up Skycatch. The company revealed that Komatsu is one of its major investors in the new round of $25 million financing. In the future, this partnership will create a brand new business for Komatsu: instead of selling equipment to customers earlier, the company can help customers get rid of their work and then use UAV to control their automatic driving vehicles to complete these works. In this process, only one or two staff members are needed to prepare for a rainy day.
Before using the UAV, Komatsu has been testing unmanned excavators, bulldozers and dump trucks. But these vehicles have been lacking in observation of the surrounding environment and the ability to excavate exactly how much soil. Komatsu can only use the manual map to guide the work of the autopilot. "Due to the low accuracy of manual geodetic survey, many buildings are in error of 20% to 30% after completion of construction," said Chikashi Shike, an intelligent building department of Komatsu.
Komatsu revealed that with Skycatch unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), their range of error significantly reduced and the time for mapping was significantly reduced. "With traditional manual methods, we need an average of two weeks to complete the measurement," Kenishi Nishihara, director of the Komatsu intelligent building project, said. "And Skycatch UAVs, we only need one day, sometimes even for 30 minutes."
Skycatch is a Silicon Valley companies, but the company has decided to focus its business mainly on Japan. "Under the laws of the United States, it is difficult for you to fully automate management, so it is difficult to achieve the full value of UAVs," Skycatch CEO Christian Sanz (Christian Sanz) said. "In Japan, people are very recognizable and grateful for the contributions of the UAVs."
Sanz said. "In other places, people are still cautious about working with robots."
