Caterpillar continues its advancements in autonomous haul trucks, revealing its first deployment of the technology for the aggregates industry.
Luck Stone’s Bull Run Plant in Chantilly, Virginia, becomes the first to run the self-driving Cat 777 rigid-frame dump truck equipped with MineStar Command, Caterpillar’s autonomous system.
Luck Stone is the largest family-owned and -operated producer of crushed stone, sand and gravel in the U.S. and has been working with Caterpillar for the past two years to expand the autonomous truck fleet and come up with an economically viable solution for the market.
The 777 has a 101-ton payload and runs on a 1,025-gross-horsepower Cat engine. Cat MineStarCommand uses light-detection and ranging (LiDAR), a laser-based imaging system to avoid obstacles and stay on course. The system fires lasers at over 1 million times per second.This creates a detailed point cloud that shows where the truck encountered solid objects, according to Caterpillar.
I wonder if the next step for these vehicles is to be driven by AI.