Capital Equipment News January 2018

As R&D continues apace, HAMM is already working on its autonomous rollers, said to be the next big thing in this range of equipment.

sionLink software can be used to make data utilisation easier. Meanwhile, Caterpillar also offers MDP compaction measurement technology for soil applications, an exclusive technolo- gy that provides an advantage in terms of application range compared to accelerom- eter-based measurement technologies. MDP does not require a vibrating drum to measure indications of soil stiffness, as all other technologies currently require. This means that the measurement system can be used near sensitive structures or on bridge decks. It also means that the system per- forms much more reliably on cohesive soils, which can make accelerometer-based mea- surement highly variable (unreliable). Thus, MDP can be used on all soil types, and with machines equipped with smooth drums or padfoot drums. According to Hanekom, Bomag has its own documentation system, the BCM05 which gives GPS co-ordinates, the stiff- ness of the soil/asphalt and the number of passes that have been made as well as the temperature of the asphalt in the asphalt applications. “The BCM05 System allows you to set up a whole job site on the system and save it on a USB device so that it can be uploaded to a computer to monitor and print a pdf of the jobsite,” explains Hanekom. In addition, all Bomag rollers can be ordered “plug and play” for a third party comput- er system should one not want to use the BCM05 system.

Bell Equipment, through its agreement with Bomag, offers technology leading vibratory compaction equipment for soil and asphalt.

In addition to the Vario Control, Asphalt Manager and BCM05 systems already mentioned, Bomag also has the BCM Net system. This enables one to programme a fleet of Bomag machines on a jobsite so that these machines will talk to one another and the operators can see where they are on the job site and where they are getting compaction and where they are not so that they can correct themselves. Road ahead As R&D continues apace, what are some of the future developments we are likely to see in this range of equipment in years to come? Kukard says autonomous rollers are the next big thing in this range of equipment. HAMM has already successfully completed the first steps of the journey. “Not just on paper but in practice, in the form of endurance testing at the Tirschen- reuth factory, and by developing a driverless shadowing roller that follows a preceding

machine since 2014,” says Kukard, adding that HAMM has now clocked up over 10 000 hours on this test track and learned a great deal about autonomous driving. The trials currently underway within the limits of a test track are just one component of the future-oriented ‘Autonomous Rollers’ project. Although it will be some years until HAMM rollers are driving and compacting entirely autonomously, the studies and trials at HAMM have already demonstrated that such machines allow compaction quality and efficiency to be noticeably increased. “This development will not stop at con- struction machinery. Rollers for asphalt and soil compaction will be among the first ve- hicles in which such systems will widely establish themselves. This is because, in many respects, they are closer to cars than many other types of machine are. This is why we have been dealing with this subject for some time at HAMM,” concludes Dr. Stefan Klumpp, CTO of HAMM AG. b

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