So why is Caterpillar developing remote control bulldozers? There are actually 3 reasons why they are doing this:
First and foremost is safety.
As you can see, these vehicles sometimes operate in hazardous and dangerous environments. Removing the operator from the vehicle means they don’t have to be in these dangerous environments to do their work.
Second, Caterpillar hopes to increase the productivity of the operators. There are many advantages to having an operator control a vehicle from a remote location. They don’t have to drive nearly as far to get to a far-flung worksite, they don’t have to take as many mandatory breaks and the working conditions are much more comfortable.
* Potential Setup for a central office control terminal as seen at Bauma 2010.
Lastly, as a more long term-goal, Caterpillar wants to allow operators to run more than one vehicle at time. This means that the vehicles themselves would be semi-autonomous and the operator would intervene when there are more complex or difficult tasks to perform. This would make the operator more efficient and allow more work to be completed overall.
