Unparalleled Precision: Trimble’s advanced GPS and GNSS technology guide your excavator’s movements with incredible accuracy. This means your excavation aligns precisely with your project plans, ensuring every dig is exactly where it needs to be.
Boosted Efficiency: With real-time data and automated guidance, your excavation tasks are completed faster and more efficiently. This streamlined process saves time and significantly reduces the need for manual grade checking.
Cost-Effective Operations: The precision of Trimble’s system minimizes costly rework and material wastage. Completing projects more efficiently saves on labor and operational costs, enhancing your overall profitability.
Enhanced Safety: Safety on the construction site is paramount. Trimble’s machine control reduces the need for manual intervention in excavation, thereby minimizing the risk of accidents and ensuring a safer work environment for your team.
User-Friendly Interface: Despite its advanced capabilities, Trimble’s system is designed with user-friendliness in mind. Its intuitive interface ensures that your operators can quickly adapt to and effectively utilize the technology.
Sustainable Practices: Trimble helps reduce your carbon footprint by optimising your excavation process. Efficient operations lead to lower fuel consumption and reduced emissions, contributing to more environmentally friendly construction practices.
Seamless Integration: Trimble’s Excavator Machine Control seamlessly integrates with your existing systems and workflows, ensuring a smooth transition and immediate enhancement of your excavation capabilities.
In summary, Trimble Excavator Machine Control is not just a tool; it’s a comprehensive solution that brings precision, efficiency, safety, and sustainability to your construction projects. Talk to us today!
The construction industry, one of the world’s largest manufacturing sectors, has embraced automation slowly. However, integrating more innovative technologies, such as 3D positioning and guidance, is crucial for automating the industry, boosting productivity, and delivering impressive ROI for contractors. Here’s how we can assist in overcoming the challenges and reaping the benefits of GNSS-based 3D machine control.
Traditional vs. Technological Approach: Traditionally, construction sites relied on surveyors to stake grade level points, followed by heavy machinery grading to these levels, often accidentally removing stakes in the process. While effective, this method lacked efficiency and safety. The evolution of GNSS-based 3D machine control technology has transformed this process. Equipping heavy machinery with a complete GNSS system eliminates guesswork between stake points, allowing for real-time cut/fill operations, enhancing job accuracy, productivity, and efficiency.
Barriers to Entry and Our Solutions: The adoption of 3D machine control faces challenges, primarily the high initial investment and the complexity of the technology. Different machines require multiple configurations and features, which can escalate costs. However, we can help justify these costs by demonstrating the significant productivity gains and ROI benefits for various applications.
The learning curve and technical expertise required for these systems can be daunting. We offer comprehensive training and support, making these systems more user-friendly and intuitive. Our team assists with technical preparations like data preparation, site calibration/localization, and RTK setup, ensuring maximum effectiveness right from the start.
Benefits of 3D Machine Control: The competitive edge gained from using 3D machine control systems is substantial. These systems enable contractors to set up job sites quickly and efficiently. The precision of GNSS-based systems results in less rework and increased job time efficiency.
Operational costs are reduced as operators can achieve the desired grade faster, using less fuel and resources. Additionally, completing work within the safety of a machine’s cab promotes a safer work environment and significantly boosts production.
In summary, while the challenges of adopting GNSS-based 3D machine control in construction are real, the benefits far outweigh the cons. With our expertise and support, contractors can navigate these challenges, harnessing the power of this technology to achieve safer, more efficient, and cost-effective construction processes.
From self-grading diggers to autonomous trucks, machine control tech is shaking up the construction game. But what’s the go with this tech?
First up, let’s crack into what ‘machine control’ means and why it’s a big deal. In simple terms, machine control hardware and software are there to figure out where a machine is sitting on the planet and how that stacks up against the planned design. It uses data from satellites or total stations and 3D models to make sure operators can put their machinery right where it needs to be, check the grade, automate some of the grunt work, and gather data. With a bunch of positioning sensors and a display, machine control gives operators a clear picture of where their machine’s bucket or blade is in relation to the planned design.
This tech has been helping the construction mob with earthworks since the late ’90s. It lets decisions be made based on solid data, not just the traditional guesswork or how skilled the operator is. This means operators can get more done, more accurately.
Machine control on excavators, dozers, and graders saves time, cash, and fuel, thanks to being more on the money and working better. With solution platforms, operators can mix and match total stations or GNSS with different types of machinery, giving them heaps of flexibility.
Machine control’s getting a run on all sorts of construction gear now – like graders, dozers, and more recently, excavators. Before this tech came along, operators had to manually check everything – a process that was slower, less accurate, and riskier because the grade checkers had to get up close and personal with the machines. When 2D and 3D tech started getting better, early machine control tech came along too. It gave operators simple visual guides, like systems showing how deep to cut, and let dozer and grader blades be controlled to stay on grade.
Back in the day, rotating lasers were used to send signals picked up by sensors on the machines, giving operators the basic info they needed. But compared to today’s machine control, these early systems were pretty limited and often too pricey or complex.
Challenges in the Construction Industry Today: Fast forward to now, and the construction industry’s facing a few hurdles. There’s a real struggle to get young people into the trade, leading to a shortage of skilled operators. This could mean a big gap in skills, affecting the quality and productivity of projects. To hit construction targets and tackle this skills gap, the industry’s leaning more towards automated machine control.
Automated Machine Control: This isn’t just about giving operators a visual guide; automated machine control actually moves the blade to grade by controlling the machine’s hydraulics. This puts the responsibility for accuracy and speed on the tech, not just the operator. So, even newbies or less-skilled operators can work like pros, and the seasoned operators can work smarter and faster.
Adoption of Automated Machine Control: Looking at the construction scene today, it’s clear that machine control automation isn’t being picked up at the same rate across all machines. While graders and dozers are getting automated, excavators are lagging behind, with only about 10% adoption in Europe, compared to over 50% for dozers. In the past, with plenty of skilled workers around, the push for automation on excavators wasn’t huge. But now, with a need for more productivity and fewer skilled operators, it’s time for the construction industry to get behind the benefits of investing in automated machine control.
Hemisphere is the leader in high-performance satellite positioning accuracy and reliability. Hemisphere GNSS’ next-generation construction products deliver advanced solutions and all of the components required to accurately and efficiently manage your data and take control of your machines and job sites.
Hemisphere service industries such as Agriculture, Construction & Mining, Marine and OEM. Their products include OEM Boards, Receivers, Smart Antennas, Antennas, Advanced Rugged Devices and Software Solutions.
Hemisphere products maintain a strong technology foundation built with diverse intellectual property and a relentless focus on innovation, Hemisphere is the leader in high-performance satellite positioning accuracy and reliability offering the best prices and performance solutions for today’s global GNSS marketplace.
Red Edge Resources is able to provide a variety of product solutions for your business’s machine control needs. Our company can supply, fit, calibrate, train, maintain and support all Hemisphere Machine Control products just like all other main brands.
The Vector VR1000 is Hemisphere GNSS’ premiere multi-GNSS, multi-frequency position and heading receiver designed specifically for the machine control market. Providing precise heading, Athena RTK positioning, and full Atlas capability, its rugged design is compliant to IP69K, MIL-STD-810G, and IEC 60068-2 standards.
The VR1000 supports antenna separations up to 10 meters, offering heading accuracy to 0.01 degrees RMS in addition to RTK position accuracy and full support for Hemisphere GNSS’ Atlas Global Correction Service.
Key Features
Athena™ RTK Engine
Extremely accurate heading with baselines up to 10m
Integrated Ethernet, CAN, internal 400MHz radio, Serial, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi
Powerful WebUI accessed via Wi-Fi plus 12 multi- colour LEDs
Integrated IMU delivers fast start-up times and maintains heading during temporary GNSS outage
Fully rugged IP69K, and MIL-STD-810G compliant solution for the harshest environments
VR500 Dozer Kit
The Vector™ VR500 is Hemisphere’s latest rugged all-in-one multi-frequency, multi-GNSS smart antenna, providing RTK-level position and precise heading. The integrated UHF radio, Ethernet and Wi-Fi capabilities provide versatile access to RTK correction data and services. The VR500 is compliant to IP69, and MIL-STD-810G standards for water ingress, shock, and vibration, for the harshest environments. The VR500 is an excellent solution for machine control and other challenging applications that require high-accuracy position and heading data.
The all-in-one VR500 with set antenna separation provides consistent and reliable position and heading accuracy.
Key Features
Integrated all-in-one RTK capable position & heading solution
Athena™ RTK Engine
Atlas® Global Correction Service
Integrated IMU delivers fast start-up times and maintains heading during temporary GNSS outage
Fully rugged IP69, and MIL-STD810G compliant solution for the harshest environments
Powerful WebUI accessed via Wi-Fi plus 4 multi-colour LEDs
C631 Base and Rover
The C631 is Hemisphere’s all-new multi-GNSS, multi-frequency smart antenna. The C631 provides robust performance and high precision in a compact and rugged package. With multiple wireless communication ports and an open GNSS interface, the C631 can be used in a variety of operating modes. Use the C631 as a precise base station sending RTK to your existing rover network. Turn the C631 into a lightweight and easy-to-use rover by connecting it to your base via UHF radio or Wi-Fi network. The built-in web user interface (WebUI) can be used to control and manage the receiver status and operation, as well as to upgrade the C631 with new firmware and activations. C631 is Athena-enabled and Atlas-capable (subscription required).
The C631 receiver is powered by Athena RTK technology. With Athena, C631 provides state-of-the-art RTK performance when receiving corrections from a static base station or network RTK correction system. With multiple connectivity options, the C631 allows for RTK corrections to be received over radio, cell modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or serial connection. C631 delivers centimetre-level accuracy with virtually instantaneous initialization times and cutting-edge robustness in challenging environments.
The C631 receiver also enables users to work with Atlas. Atlas is Hemisphere’s industry-leading global correction service, which can be added as a subscription to the C631. Atlas delivers worldwide centimetre-level correction data over L-band communication satellites. With Atlas, C631 users can experience sub-decimeter positioning performance anywhere on Earth, without the need to be near a GNSS or communication infrastructure.
Key Features
Multi-frequency GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, IRNSS, and Atlas L-band
Long-range RTK baselines up to 50 km with fast acquisition times
UHF (400 MHz & 900 MHz), cellular, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi wireless communication
Internal sensor corrects collected point coordinates to within 2 cm
R632 GNSS Base Station
Hemisphere’s R632 GNSS receiver is a full-solution product in an incredibly compact and robust package, offering the ability to upgrade to an astounding 0.01° accurate heading easily.
Built on the foundation of Hemisphere’s new Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila core technologies, the R632 offers amazing new interference rejection and multipath mitigation. The result is an exceptional combination of performance, communications, and connectivity. The R632’s standard configuration offers multiple connectivity methods and an impressive array of wireless communications.
Through Hemisphere’s Atlas correction network, the R632 offers worldwide stand-alone positioning to 4 cm.
The R632 is an incredible solution for almost any application requiring a professional-level position and heading performance.
With each new model year, equipment becomes even more technology-rich — adding new standard features and optional add-ons that promise increased productivity. As we rolled out Volvo Dig Assist, our excavator machine control system, I’ve had a lot of interest from customers and questions about whether it’s worth the investment.
Here are the six ways I tell my customers they can generate a quick ROI from excavator control systems.
1. GET MORE ACCURATE TRENCHING
Machine control systems allow operators to input the specifications for even the most complex trenches in minutes—including adding slope or multiple layers — thereby eliminating much of the usual prep work. A virtual guideline is provided for operators as they dig the trench, allowing them to do the work correctly the first time.
2. SIMPLIFY DIGGING SHAPES
Some jobs require a more complex shape, whether trenching or digging a basement. Some machine control systems allow operators to draw 2D shapes directly from the cab (like a step trench for installing multiple utility lines) or even choose from a library of pre-built shapes, which they can then modify on the fly to match job requirements. This reduces the need for additional surveyors and measuring.
3. ENJOY SAFER WORK ENVIRONMENTS
Machine control systems can provide visual and audible warnings to avoid jobsite obstacles. Simply input the depth to indicate how deep an operator can dig without hitting utility lines, or input the height to measure the maximum extension of the arm before hitting power lines. Avoiding even one accident is imperative for obvious reasons — secondarily, it can also result in a positive ROI.
4. REDUCE LABOR COSTS
Decreasing the time spent checking and re-checking depth and slope accuracy frees up crewmembers to do other work, which can increase jobsite productivity and efficiency. In addition, operators aren’t going to waste time over-digging or reworking because they can see job progress in real time.
While machine control systems won’t eliminate the need for on-site surveying, they will reduce the need for some related tasks. Even some site prep work — like putting stakes in the ground — isn’t required with machine control systems. This frees up time and labor, allowing contractors to bid on more or larger jobs.
5. GAIN A COMPETITIVE EDGE
Machine control systems allow contractors to operate in environments where other excavators might struggle, such as underwater. With watertight sensors, operators can input job specifications and see, in real time, the position of the bucket on the screen — even though they can’t see underwater.
6. TURN NOVICES INTO EXPERTS
New operators won’t seem so green with excavator machine control systems like Volvo Dig Assist. Using one is as simple as running a tablet or smartphone, with a learning curve of less than a few minutes. Machine control systems are also a great training tool, as the operator doesn’t have to worry about making errors and has a visual aid to judge their accuracy.
I truly believe machine control solutions are a worthy investment that pays for itself. If you want to learn more about whether Volvo Dig Assist is right for you, just reach out.
