volvo construction equipment Archives - MSPI - Master's in Sustainable Product-Service System Innovation

Extreme PSS Innovation 2017/18 completed

Christian Johansson — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 08:21:00 +0000

In the Extreme PSS Innovation course, students from BTH’s masters programmes in Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Management and Engineering, and Sustainable Product-Service System Innovation (MSPI) are given challenges from real industrial companies to solve. The course is a central part of BTH’s mantra “In Real Life”.

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Extreme PSS Innovation Completed

Christian Johansson — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 17:39:01 +0000

Using their achieved engineering skills to solve real challenges from real industrial companies is an important and inspiring challenge for the almost ready engineering students and a central part of the “In Real Life” mantra that BTH students practice. This years’ breed of Innovative product development students from three different programs have come together to address challenges from six different partner organizations.

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cx.Link – Autonomous Construction Machines and Humans

Christian Johansson — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 07:00:50 +0000

During the 2015/2016 academic year three BTH students have been collaborating with three students from Stanford University‘s ME310 Global Design Course. Project sponsor has been Volvo Construction Equipment. The project has focused on building trust between autonomous construction machines and humans in construction sites.

About the project

Project website: htttp://www.me310volvoce2016.com

Courses: ME310 (Stanford), TE2501 (MSc thesis), MT1441 (Innovation project), MT1480 (Innovation project, implementation)

Students:

Stanford ME310: Sam Frishman, Qinye Alsa Liu, Xiang “Alvin” Zhang

BTH (MSPI / MEch Engn): Hillevi Hallberg Lyggemark, Ryan Ruvald, David Winqvist

cx.Link team Ryan Ruvald, Xiang Alvin Zhang, Qinye Also Liu, Hillevi Hallberg Lyggemark, Sam Frishman, David Winqvist

Project prompt

The students were tasked with a rather open prompt. They should explore and design solutions for a context where autonomous construction machines collaborate with humans in a construction site. To make this collaboration effective and efficient, several factors relating to trust and communication should be incorporated.

cx.Link system

cx.Link

The cx.Link is a concept to support autonomous construction vehicles operating alongside human workers on major construction sites. The system contains a command center, a pod with a beacon light on each construction machine, a wrist mounted display, and a hardhat. In concert they work to enhance communication and thus trust in construction sites. The vision is

Below follows some descriptions of the parts.

The command center

The command center is the brain and processing unity of the system. It receives a bird’s-eye view of the construction site from an overhead camera. This is combined with information about machine and worker positions. This information is communicated to the other parts of the system and is made available when needed. When needed it can, for instance, alert a worker of an imminent danger.

The machine pod

Each autonomous construction vehicle is fitted with a machine pod. The pod features a signal light, which communicates with workers on the construction site. Here, function and status of the machine is stated so that the user can see that it is operational.

The wrist-mounted display

Each worker will have some additional personal equipment, which will provide them with added capabilities for communication and increased safety. The wrist-mounted display is implemented on a smartphone with a wrist mount. It displays information for the worker. Additionally, it provides wireless connectivity and GPS positioning.

The hardhat

In all constructions sites, the hardhat is a mandatory personal equipment for all construction workers. In the cx.Link concept, the hardhat is fitted with additional functionality. It is fitted with a bone conduction headset and led lights for alerting the worker of danger, system functionality, and machine intent. Depending on the specific situation, the system will provide workers with relevant information to enable them to take appropriate action.

As a leader in the construction industry, Volvo Construction Equipment are exploring concepts for running fully autonomous construction machines in aiming to increase productivity and to enhance safety for people in the sites. Even in this scenario there will be people on the site, maintaining machines and leading the operations. Therefore, the aim of the project is to create a system that will enable efficient communication between human workers and automated machines. Such a system will increase safety and foster trust between the human workers and machines.

More information

Find more information about this year’s project here:

Find more information about previous years’ ME310 projects on these links:

ME310 2015-2016: Human-Autonomous Machine Interaction
ME310 2014-2015: Urban Mining
ME310 2013-2014: Urban Mining
ME310 2012-2013: Idéum
ME310 related on our web

For more information, contact Christian Johansson (christian.m.johansson@bth.se) or Prof Tobias Larsson (tobias.larsson@bth.se).

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Tales from the field: The Customer Solution for Coal Mining Industry in West of China

Tobias Larsson — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 07:59:35 +0000

Volvo CE Excavator

This story is not about a cool graduation trip, but a collaborative research project between Product Development Research Lab (http://www.bth.se/pdrl) at BTH and Volvo Construction Equipment after my fresh graduation from the Masters program in Sustainable Product-Service System Innovation (MSPI, https://www.mspi.se) at BTH.

In this project, my task is to explore and find new ways of designing the sustainable product-service systems and inherent values for Volvo CE to provide the new customer solutions for coal mining industry in China. For that, my footprints were mapped with 4600KM, 60days, 5 cities, 12 mining sites in west of China, hopefully compensating this with improved sustainability in future product-service solutions and their operation.

Yan Zhang

My daily job is like an ”needfinding spy” to act in different roles for capturing the needs from state-owned mining company, project contractors and different equipment operators. Moreover, I need to work closely together with Volvo’s dealer, service staff and maintenance team for understanding how Volvo supports their customer on mining sites. A real life in mining sites is; getting used to live with sandstorm; no water; be a good actor, and; keep out of the way of hundred machines.

Of course, you can find no Internet and mobile signal at sites. Gender wise; at least I haven’t seen a female but stay with thousands of men and construction machines for one month. Ridding, but respecting, this harsh environment, the customer value, needs, problems and the production process are captured and fully analyzed in my pocket. After that, a customer solution design process will take place in collaboration with BTH and VCE to generate more sustainable customer solutions for these customers.

At Inner Mongolia I was completely taken when I first saw the grassland! Not because how beautiful or attractive as it supposed to be, but how odd the current situation came about in my eyes; hundreds of surface mining sites are living there, countless coal mines are excavating from our mother earth in there. The grassland was a place full of holes like a honeycomb and this all has truly happened. The main process of surface mining is firstly removing trees and grass out of grassland, then the construction equipment strips the soil by a vertical way that dig down around 100-200m until the underground coal be exposed. After that the coal were taken out and transported to power plants in different cities. All these processes are working 24 hours nonstop, day to day and, year after year as we speak.

As I know that many environmentalists argue that the coal mining sites should close immediately since the negative environmental impact from this industry is obvious. But why is the current situation still being maintained, and still running? How many people can understand the reason behind this why? In China, the most electrical energy is generated by coal in the local thermal power plant. Although many people have their general ideas like wind power, solar energy and other way which are more environmental friendly than coal energy, still the question is if these green approaches could directly meet the needs from 1.3 billion people and the second largest economy in the world as of now? The answer is “No”. Obviously, people choose coal energy as adaptive solution since there are lacking other available solutions that can be applied to satisfy their needs in a viable way. Follow a logical flow, coal is used to generate energy and most of our social activities are based on energy consumption. So the over-energy consumption is the enemy actually.

As engineers, what we need to do is not enrol in endless complaining on coal mining but try to find the future sustainable solutions. If that works, our society would like to choose this adaptive way and we can happily see coal mining exploration die out from the fact that better solutions coming into play.

Again, as an engineer, keep calm and carry on, and I try bringing my part of the puzzle towards the future sustainable society!

All the best,

Yan Zhang, MSPI’12

Related information

A note on the project from Jenny Elfsberg, Director of Emerging Technologies at Volvo Construction Equipment.

Jenny Elfsberg

“Thanks to our collaboration with BTH we can utilize student projects, thesis works, research projects for PhD students, and even short term assignments as this case to get very good support in our transformation from product focused sales to total customer solutions focus with sustainability in focus, but also in other areas. To collaborate with individuals knowing methods for product-service system design, but without deep insight in Volvo operations gives us valuable alternative perspectives sometimes and confirm our own reasoning sometimes. It is definitely an effective and interesting way to increase our knowledge. We also get an opportunity to see how well promising potential employees performs. Our collaboration with BTH is a real win/win partnership – our company is in a very exciting transformational phase which gives BTH good examples for their research and since BTH collaborate with other industries that have already done their shifts from products to services, for example, we can gain knowledge about proven methods instead of inventing everything ourselves.”

For more information, contact Professor Tobias C. Larsson, tobias.larsson@bth.se, Product Development Research Lab.

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Volvo methane gas trucks

Tobias Larsson — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 07:20:00 +0000

In this project, in cooperation with Volvo, an overarching sustainability analysis related to new gas trucks was done to give a holistic view about all the threats and opportunities around the product. In this project, the life cycle of the product and its value chain was considered. SWOT, PESTLE, and stakeholder analysis were performed to have broad understanding of the related issues.

Project details: Volvo Methane Gas Trucks

Team: MSPI’12 Abbas “Behrad” Mirafshar, Xuefeng “Snovo” Bai, Xi “Cecilia” Chen

Partner: Volvo Construction Equipment

Course: Engineering for a Sustainable Society (ESS)

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PSS Extreme innovation 2011-2012

Tobias Larsson — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:26:33 +0000

The course is focused on, together with external partner, carrying out a product-service system innovation project with sustainability and innovation focus.

The purpose of the course is for the students to gain an understanding of how different solutions are developed within industry today through applying and integrating knowledge necessary for future product- and service innovation. Participants will gain knowledge in project management, creative concept development, systems thinking for sustainability and technological solutions.

Projects

See the final presentation of PSS Extreme Innovation course here (20120119).

The teams where:

Team MedTech: project within healthtech development
Team Volvo: project with Volvo Construction Equipment
Team Dynapac: project with Dynapac Compaction Equipment

Download PSS Extreme Innovation folder here: BTH-PSSEI-2012.pdf

Links:

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Future driving environment

Tobias Larsson — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:48:23 +0000

This project was about coming with an extreme PSS idea in collaboration with a partner company.

The student group here put together some ideas for how augmented reality and a united recycling alliance can help prepare the way to autonomous worksites of the future! The cab provided a demonstration of how the driver experience could be when the real operating experience is augmented for improved performance.

Team: MSPI and Mechanical Engineers

Partner: Volvo Construction Equipment

Course: Product-Service System Extreme Innovation (PSSEI)

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