Tomahawk Construction employs Teleo autonomous technology to clear land for development – Robotics & Automation News
Tomahawk Construction is developing land to create a new 700-acre residential community in Naples, Florida. It is also among the many heavy construction companies looking for ways to overcome an ongoing labor shortage plaguing the industry.
“We really have just had a hard time getting people into haul trucks,” says Tomahawk owner Scott Lyons.
The labor shortage isn’t going away anytime soon. As experienced operators retire, the industry is struggling to attract much-needed new operators to fill job vacancies, resulting in spiraling project costs and timelines.
Teleo builds autonomous technology for heavy equipment and provides a viable solution to address Tomahawk’s labor shortage. Teleo retrofits any make, model and year of heavy equipment with its technology that enables remote and autonomous operations of the machines.
Teleo’s technology, called Supervised Autonomy, allows Tomahawk machine operator Max Bogacz to do something that’s never been done before: “I am the first operator in the world to run multiple articulated dump trucks at once,” says Bogacz.
Specifically, he remotely operates three Teleo-equipped articulated dump trucks (ADTs) on the Naples jobsite, simultaneously, from a command center 40 miles away in Fort Myers.
Tomahawk recently became the first customer to get Teleo’s autonomous capabilities on their machines. This means that while machines are set to autonomous mode, they can perform routine and repetitive tasks on their own, like hauling materials from one point to another.
If there are any complex tasks that the autonomous technology cannot yet fully handle, the machine waits for the operator and Bogacz is there to take over. Bogacz easily switches between machines with the press of a button.
“Ever since we have installed Teleo units on the trucks, we haven’t had one sitting,” notes Lyons. “It lets us expand who we would typically hire for a haul truck. So today we’ll see one operator per three trucks.”
The land Tomahawk is developing is the future home of Caymas Naples, a luxury community of 457 single-family homes by Stock Development, the region’s award winning developer of luxury communities.
Set on 780 acres, the 12-acre amenity campus features a 30,000-square foot resort-style clubhouse, a sports center, dog park and numerous other amenities.
The community also features approximately 280 acres of lakes and 270 acres of onsite preserves. As part of the development, Tomahawk will excavate and move more than 2.2 million cubic yards of material from the Naples jobsite, a former mining operation.
Solving the labor shortage using Teleo Supervised Autonomy has been a game-changer for Tomahawk, and it’s made for a safer and more accessible work environment for Bogacz.
According to Lyons, “I told all the OEM manufacturers that I wanted an autonomous option. Teleo has really given us the only option to date to make it happen.”
