Adapting On-Highway Technology for Off-Highway Machines
We’re surrounded by machines that get smarter every day, though not necessarily in the sense of becoming independent. Rather, this powerful shift in machine intelligence is learning not only to operate but also to assist. Just look at today’s cars: 360-degree cameras, adaptive cruise control, lane assist, blind spot detection. These once-futuristic features are now standard, and they’re reshaping what operators expect across all types of equipment—including mobile machinery. In this episode of Evolution in Controls, host Tim Wilson meets with Tim Grzybowski, Regional Vice President of Sales at HYDAC, to discuss how HYDAC is adapting the user-assisted autonomy we’ve seen in on-highway vehicles to suit the rugged environment, safety standards, and efficiency of off-highway machines.
Although user-assisted autonomy features have been present in on-highway vehicles for quite some time, it’s only in recent years that we’ve seen them integrated into off-highway equipment because the time, cost, and labor didn’t seem worth it. However, the market is shifting, and demand for safer, simpler, faster, and more efficient off-highway machinery, particularly driven by user-assist features, is skyrocketing. Many operators are already accustomed to these benefits from their personal vehicles and understand the value they could have in their off-highway workplace equipment.
HYDAC is leading the way in designing user-assisted autonomy systems for mobile/off-highway equipment with the TT Controller—developed by HYDAC’s subsidiary TTControl—displays, ECUs, sensors, and cameras. They’ve taken what they know about on-highway vehicles and applied it to off-highway machines, ruggedizing them for the environment and making them more available to a much wider segment of customers than before.
Sensors play a significant role in this technological shift, enabling greater data collection so operators can, for example, know where cylinders are, the equipment’s position or level, or even whether the machine is about to hit something, such as a building or nearby equipment. Cameras are also becoming more numerous on the machine, as are displays in the cab itself. HYDAC’s digital cameras process the data before communicating it back to the main processor via Ethernet.
Because HYDAC offers so many components for user-assisted autonomy in mobile/off-highway equipment, they can provide complete system solutions instead of just a single component. And, as partners, Evolution can provide complete solutions tailored to exact specifications and create a scalable system that could continue to be built upon in the future.
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