XCMG, China's largest construction machinery manufacturer, is a world leader in autonomous road building technology. By integrating 5G and artificial intelligence, the company's in-house research and development team performs experiments and simulations to develop high-precision technologies for usage in real-world settings.
The research and development team recently conducted three straight months of on-site trials. The team created a high-precision alignment solution for an unmanned construction roller's strapdown inertial navigation system, increasing control accuracy from 20cm to 5cm. The team labored in difficult weather conditions in Xinjiang's Karamay Desert. After hundreds of days of data collection and testing, the team resolved industry-wide bottleneck issues such as complex environment cluster interaction and welt compression, resulting in a 20% increase in compression efficiency.
These efforts by the in-house research and development team ultimately result in advancements and improvements to XCMG's autonomous road building technology. To date, the company's second-generation unmanned cluster construction equipment has been used in 15 highway construction projects spanning 12 provinces throughout China, including the Pan-Dalian Expressway, the Jingxiong Expressway, the reconstruction and expansion of the Beijing-Taipei Expressway, the S420 Jinhu Section, the Xinjiang S21 Desert Expressway, and maintenance projects on the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway.
The overall length of construction is 500 kilometers, the longest in the industry, and the average annual time spent by technicians doing the in-depth study is 170 days. National authorities have previously designated vital indications such as vehicle positioning and acquisition accuracy, trajectory and control accuracy, and obstacle avoidance radar sensitivity for technical appraisal. Additionally, the XCMG comprehensive test site's unmanned system claims a 3,000-hour test duration without incident.
According to data from significant projects like the Jingxiong Expressway, Panda Expressway, and Xinliunan Expressway, unmanned construction rollers consumed 85 percent of working time and 80 percent of running track for every 1km of subgrade development compared to traditional construction rollers. In addition, the unmanned construction rollers resulted in a 15% reduction in fuel consumption and a 20% increase in efficiency.
"Our autonomous road construction technology efforts focus on three core points: efficiency, quality, and cost. Just like the automated production line of the manufacturing industry, automated construction technology can improve standardization and achieve high-quality, high-efficiency construction solutions,"
Cui Jisheng, General Manager of XCMG Road Machinery Division