Robots.com helps Caterpillar automate internal processes

Cater­pil­lar, Inc is the world’s lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­er of con­struc­tion, min­ing, and oth­er heavy equip­ment. Cater­pil­lar rec­og­nized the need for automa­tion as syn­ony­mous to the need for an increased up-time. Automa­tion sys­tems reduce how long min­ing and oth­er process­es take, as well as how cost­ly they are. A remote facil­i­ty reduces oper­a­tor fatigue since the on-board com­put­ers, cam­eras, lasers, and soft­ware autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al­ly steer the vehi­cle dur­ing haulage. The oper­a­tor can also con­trol mul­ti­ple machines simultaneously.

Caterpillar’s Cat Mines­tar Sys­tem, Com­mand, enables its cus­tomers to make the future of min­ing a real­i­ty today. Com­mand enables the user to imple­ment remote con­trol, semi-autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al or ful­ly autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al min­ing equip­ment systems.

Com­mand for Drilling and Com­mand for Doz­ing offers a ful­ly auto­mat­ed sys­tem, keep­ing oper­a­tors out of the pit and away from explo­sive areas. Auto­mat­ed tram­ming and drilling at tar­get loca­tions is pos­si­ble, and feed­back aid­ing in ore sam­pling and hole load­ing is pro­vid­ed. Com­mand for Haul­ing is also a ful­ly autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al sys­tem, tak­ing advan­tage of the most sophis­ti­cat­ed per­cep­tion and on-board intel­li­gence tech­nolo­gies. Com­mand for Long­wall plows enables advanced automa­tion and remote oper­a­tion capa­bil­i­ties allow­ing oper­a­tors to work from a safe loca­tion away from the face. They are pro­vid­ed with a clear pic­ture of the work area through analy­sis, log­ging, and visu­al­iza­tion capa­bil­i­ties due to high speed com­put­er pro­cess­ing. Final­ly, Com­mand for Under­ground is a semi-autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al sys­tem that auto­mates tram­ming func­tions of Cater­pil­lar Load Haul Dump machines.

The Pro­gram­ma­ble Min­ing Con­trols fam­i­ly offers one-stop shop­ping for all con­trols and sen­sors of com­po­nents of a long­wall sys­tem. The PMC‑R is based on the suc­cess­ful PM4 con­troller, and offers enhanced com­put­ing pow­er and data trans­fer. The PMC‑D offers supe­ri­or con­trol of Armored Face Con­vey­or dri­ves. The PMC‑V is the user inter­face and allows all face con­vey­or para­me­ters to be set. The PMC‑P is a node com­put­er that facil­i­tates com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the indi­vid­ual com­po­nents and oth­er mine com­put­er networks.

Cater­pil­lar signed a three-year agree­ment for research with Carnegie Mel­lon University’s Robot­ics Insti­tute. This part­ner­ship result­ed in the researchers at the Robot­ics Insti­tute devel­op­ing autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al ver­sions of large haul trucks used in min­ing oper­a­tions. The researchers worked close­ly with Caterpillar’s Pitts­burgh Automa­tion Center.

Self-dri­ving trucks will be used in con­junc­tion with Caterpillar’s two largest haul trucks with pay­load capac­i­ties of 240 tons. The dri­ver-less truck is a piece of an autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al min­ing haulage sys­tem, designed to pro­vide pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains through con­sis­ten­cy. Increased speed to mar­ket is one of Caterpillar’s goals, as well as inno­v­a­tive solu­tions for dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed prod­ucts and ser­vices. It is expect­ed that autonomous indus­tri­al indus­tri­al min­ing will help min­i­mize envi­ron­men­tal impact, due to increased effi­cien­cy as well as increased mine safety.

Robots​.com has worked to inte­grate robots with Cater­pil­lar in the past to help auto­mate some of their inter­nal process­es. If you are inter­est­ed in work­ing with Robots​.com for robot­ic inte­gra­tion, let us know online or at 877−762−6881.