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60 Insight | UGVs the unlikely case that someone’s hand comes between the charging plug and charging port. Future developments might include systems by which EVs can signal wirelessly to the UGV when they need to be charged, as well as their state of charge and BMS data for charging efficiency and safety. Active construction sites It might seem dangerous for UGVs to serve in active construction yards, as considerable security clearances and safety gear are necessary for human workers to access such sites. But for that very reason, allocating some key construction tasks to autonomous systems could potentially prevent injuries and save lives. Austrian company Baubot has accordingly developed its Baubot construction UGV to perform a wide range of jobs on building sites. We have previously featured unmanned systems for construction marking and materials handling, and the Baubot can handle these (using a laser for precision marking) as well as many more. “The main use-case is printing and placing custom block pavement structures,” says the company’s COO Victor Rodionov. “At Baubot we’ve created our own custom concrete additively printed cells, from design and control software through to additive materials processing and handling. We found in 2018-19 that we needed to be able to print and move the concrete on site, but there wasn’t really a suitable mobile robotic solution to do that, certainly not with the productivity and performance we needed.” That spurred the company to start building its own UGV, and it soon found that demand for the early Baubot was even higher than that for the custom concrete printing and arrangement services it had principally been designed for. Its other applications now include welding, milling, drilling, screw driving and brick laying, which it performs according to pre- programmed paths and tasks laid out in 3D operation planning software. “Drilling is one area where we’re focusing a lot of development at the moment; another is marking key fixing points for different system installations,” Rodionov says. “For example, a point for ventilation will be marked with one pattern, another would be used for water pipes and so on.” Such tasks are seen as key to freeing up workers to focus on tasks that rely more heavily on human intuition and flexibility, a key issue given the ongoing labour shortages in the construction industry. “In the past year, we decided to dedicate more resources to building Baubots as multi-role construction UGVs – modular products in their own right – to enable them to adapt to new applications very quickly,” Rodionov says. “It’s also fully electric, emissions-free, with up to 40 km of range on its onboard battery, and up to 8 hours of working time.” Although development is ongoing, there are currently two preliminary models of the Baubot. The smaller is the MRS110.10, which has a vehicle payload of 500 kg and a carrying capacity of 10 kg on its robotic arm (which also has a reach of 1100 mm). The larger MRS210.70 is around 2 m long and 80 cm wide, has a vehicle payload of 900 kg and its arm can lift 70 kg at distances of 2100 mm. Both systems perform tasks accurate to ±3 mm. “We are also developing a new system that will have 3 m of arm reach. It will be able to drive around on its battery, but an external power cable will be required for the kind of work it will be doing,” Rodionov adds. “We don’t anticipate a UGV of its power and weight-lifting requirement being used where there’s no access to the grid.” Multi-role agriculture Advances in autonomous systems have gradually made their way into various niche agricultural tasks over the past decade. Many farmers remain reluctant though to adopt unmanned systems, given what they see as burdensome training and maintenance requirements, and changing their standard operating routines. However, the labour shortages brought on by the pandemic have gone a long way towards generating enthusiasm across the agricultural market for UGVs that can handle any of the more repetitive tasks that usually fall to farmhands. Such is this growing enthusiasm that Naio Technologies has developed and unveiled its newest autonomous farming robot, the Orio, in response to calls from its larger customers for a UGV that can cover vegetable and arable fields on a larger scale than any of its previous solutions. “We previously released our Dino April/May 2022 | Unmanned Systems Technology Naio’s Orio has been developed to handle a number of farming jobs autonomously and over hundreds – potentially thousands – of acres (Courtesy of Naio)