Justification for Remote Control of Construction and Road-Making Machines

It is evident from the experience of operating the construction machinery (excavators, bulldozers, loaders etc.) that quite often the machinery and its operators are working under severe conditions. Working under threat of rock fall, on unstable or contaminated grounds, or debris handling tends to increase the impact of adverse occupational environment on the operators’ health. When the operators are at risk, it is advisable to deploy remote process control technologies on the work sites. This is what brings research and development of modern remote control systems to the top of the chart in order to improve the productivity of machinery, enhance the safety and quality of the jobs carried out. The use of remote control will exclude the adverse impact of aggressive environment during the process operations. The research allowed to establish that the design specifics of the construction and road-making machines enable them to go far beyond the standard process layout giving into a much wider range of application, up to aggressive environments. A crawler excavator model was devised, imitating the visibility range of the process areas for the manual and remote control systems. Implementation of remote control for construction and road-making machines may become a step towards a completely new level of interaction within the man-machine-environment system.