One of China’s top construction machinery companies, XCMG falls under the list of global leaders in autonomous road construction technology. The in-house team for research and development of the company conducts simulations and experiments and develops technologies which are highly precise for the users and can be adopted in real-life scenarios by combining technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence.

In recent times, the research and development team of the company has been running experimental trials on-site for three continuous months in a row. A high-precision alignment solution has been created by the team for an unnamed construction roller’s constrain inertial navigation system, which helped in improving the accuracy of control from 20cm to 5cm. The area that the team had been working in was the Karamay Desert in Xinjiang, which experienced harsh and extremely difficult weather conditions. The team was finally able to manage the bottleneck problem that is faced by the whole wide industry, after a period of hundreds of days of data collection and trials. The problems that were solved were such as welt compression, and complex environment cluster interaction, resulting in an increase of 20 per cent in the efficiency of compression.

XCMG infrastructure

XCMG is one of the global leaders in autonomous road construction technology.

These efforts by the research and development team of the company are eventually shifted to improvements and strengthening of the autonomous road construction technologies of XCMG. To the present date, the second-generation unmanned cluster construction equipment of the company has participated in over 15 highway construction projects, which cover 12 provinces in China. The provinces that were covered are Jingxiong Expressway, Pan-Dalian Expressway, expansion and reconstruction of the Beijing – Taipei expressway, Xinjiang S21 Desert Expressway, S420 Jinhu Section and also the Shanghai – Nanjing expressway and the maintenance projects for these expressways as well.

With the entire construction length of 500 km, which is the highest in the industry till now, the average annual time for the in-depth research and data collection that was conducted by the technicians of the team, took a total of 170 days. The national authorities have already recognised the key indicators of the project like acquisition accuracy, avoidance of the obstacles, control ad trajectory accuracy, radar sensitivity, etc., for the technical appraisal. The unmanned system at the XCMG extensive test site also boasts a 3,000-hour trouble-free test time.

XCMG infrastructure

The research and development team of the company has been running experimental trials on-site for three continuous months.

According to the data that was collected from the significant projects, like Jingxiong Expressway, Xinliunan Expressway and Panda Expressway, 85 per cent of the working time was used by the unmanned construction rollers and 80 per cent of the running track was taken into use for every 1 km of subgrade development, as compared to the traditional construction rollers. The fuel consumption was reduced by 15% and the productivity was increased to 20% by the automated construction rollers.

The general manager of XCMG Road Machinery Division Cui Jisheng has said that there are three core points of concern and focus for the autonomous road construction technology, which are: cost, quality and efficiency. The automated construction technology can make improvements in standardisation just like the manufacturing industry’s automated production line, and it can also achieve high efficiency and high-quality solutions for construction.