SafeAI wants to bring autonomous vehicles to construction, mining sites

Wait, who’s driving that bulldozer?

If autonomous heavy equipment startup SafeAI has its way, no one. The Santa Clara, California-based startup aims to take a leading role in automating the construction and mining sectors. But beyond removing the operator from heavy machinery, it also wants to eliminate vehicle emissions.

SafeAI and Japanese construction company Obayashi recently unveiled what they’re billing as the first-ever haul truck retrofitted to be both autonomous and electric. The advancement, the companies say, could help heavy industry companies boost safety and productivity, reduce costs, and improve environmental performance on work sites.

“We know how to do electric. That’s happening. We know how to do autonomy,” SafeAI CEO and founder Bibhrajit Halder told Tech Brew. “But bringing it together is the technical advancement we are proud of.”

SafeAI equipped a Caterpillar 725 haul truck with its autonomous-vehicle tech; Avia Engineering installed the electric drive system.

Obayashi is “excited about the retrofit aspect of this project,” Sugiura Shinya, the company’s business innovation division general manager, said in a statement. “The difference between the (original equipment manufacturer) approach and this initiative is that it puts the contractor in control.”

SafeAI’s Halder has worked in the autonomy space for nearly 20 years, including stints at Caterpillar, Ford, and Apple. Having spent much of his career focused on heavy machinery applications for autonomy, he sees the technology as a natural fit for mining or construction work sites because they’re often constrained environments involving high-risk, repetitive tasks.

“All of that makes autonomy in that environment obvious,” he said. “What SafeAI is doing, we take the existing equipment—a big truck, a dozer—retrofit it, make it fully autonomous, give it back to the end user—a mining company, construction company—so they can run it autonomously. So really taking the operator out of harm’s way and now they’re managing and orchestrating the whole site.”

Halder finds that heavy industry companies don’t need to be convinced of the benefits of autonomous-vehicle tech. They’ve seen advancements in autonomy over the years by big players like Caterpillar (though those efforts haven’t been without setbacks): “They are not asking why autonomy, should we use it? They’re asking us, how much does it cost?”

SafeAI will deploy its tech in a gold mine in Australia starting next year, with a total order of 100 trucks; Halder’s goal is to ramp up to between 2,000 and 3,000 trucks in the next five years. To date, the company has raised $64 million, according to Crunchbase, and has more than 100 employees in the US, Japan, India, and Australia.

One of SafeAI’s advantages, Halder believes, is that it doesn’t just pull data from the vehicle, but also uses lidar and Global Navigation Satellite System to map the mining and construction sites where the equipment will be used.

And rather than using passenger vehicle data, “we are training our model on [construction and mining] data,” he said. “Our AI model is not any better than what Google or Tesla have, but the difference is that we are training it for our purpose.”