Autonomy and Electrification: Heavy Industries Dynamic Duo

SafeAI and Obayashi Corporation collaborate to create more productive and sustainable construction sites through research and real-world deployment.

The construction industry is booming. The world is currently on track to double its floor area by 2060; in other words, we’re adding floor space equivalent to the size of New York City every single month for the next 40 years. This boom presents immense opportunity for the construction industry—but it will also create serious growing pains. Two challenges in particular stand out.

The first is productivity. Right now, the world has just a small fraction of the buildings and infrastructure it will need in the coming decades. To plug this gap and meet growing demand, construction crews need to ramp up efficiency and productivity. Yet, productivity has grown just one percent annually over the last two decades—nowhere near fast enough to keep pace. Labor shortages are exacerbating this challenge. At the end of 2022, there were 388,000 open positions in the construction field—up about 22,000 from the year before. Some experts believe this labor crunch will only worsen. 

The second major challenge is environmental impact. The building and construction sector’s energy consumption hit an all-time high last year. The construction process alone accounts for about 10% of the world’s total CO2 emissions. This is an acute problem from a climate perspective and, increasingly, from a regulatory perspective—a problem that will only get worse as the construction industry continues to grow. 

These challenges appear daunting from our current status quo. But emerging technologies—namely, autonomy and electrification—hold the potential to transform this bleak outlook into a greener, more productive way of doing business that meets growing demand for construction without derailing climate goals.

SafeAI is at the forefront of deploying these technologies to rethink the way construction operates. The company is working with a technology company with deep expertise in electrification, and construction giant Obayashi Corporation on a project to accelerate the deployment of electric, autonomous heavy equipment. SafeAI brings its powerful, scalable AI-powered retrofit autonomy to the collaboration, while their electrification partner provides its industry-leading hardware and software capabilities in zero emission powertrains, and the necessary infrastructure to operate these vehicles. 

The combined retrofitting process for the autonomous and electrification technologies is currently underway in Spain on a 25 ton articulated haul truck. Once complete, Obayashi Corporation will deploy the electric, autonomous vehicles on-site in Japan to improve its operations and advance its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) commitments. Through continued collaboration, the companies will act as a leading decarbonizing business alliance in the construction industry and contribute to a carbon neutral world. 

“ESG is a cornerstone of how we do business,” said Shinya Sugiura, General Manager of Business Innovation Division at Obayashi Corporation. “We’ve developed a robust set of ESG initiatives to establish a more environmentally responsible society, enhance our technological capabilities, and ensure occupational health and safety of our employees and all staff involved in the construction project. What’s exciting about this project with SafeAI is that it enables us to advance our goals on multiple fronts. Self-driving, zero emission vehicles make our projects significantly safer for our employees, more efficient and productive for our customers, and more sustainable for our communities and our planet.” 

Electric, autonomous heavy equipment presents a massive opportunity to address the construction industry’s biggest hurdles. Alone, automation and electrification carry powerful benefits for construction companies. Together, they can transform a job site. Benefits include:

• Efficiency and Productivity: The combination of electrification and autonomy can improve productivity by increasing operating hours by up to 1.5 times, without CO2 emissions. Electric vehicles also tend to operate more efficiently than internal combustion vehicles, and autonomous, electric vehicles enable more efficient site orchestration to optimize operations and prevent delays. 
  
  
• Cost: Autonomous vehicles can shorten a five year commercial construction project—like a road or dam—to four years, saving companies millions of dollars. Electric vehicles offer improved performance, negligible maintenance costs, and longer uptime and vehicle life, significantly lowering the cost of operations. For this project, it’s estimated that the retrofitted vehicles with the combined technologies, will reduce the total cost of ownership by 20% compared to internal combustion engine vehicles. 
  
  
• Sustainability: Zero emission vehicles have tremendous potential to help industries like construction reduce their significant carbon footprint—better positioning them to advance ESG initiatives and meet tightening regulation.
  
  
• Safety: With autonomous vehicles doing much of the heavy lifting, employees can be upskilled to focus on planning and strategic functions and remain out of harm’s way. Electric vehicles support this by also ensuring people don’t need to enter a potentially dangerous work zone to recharge vehicles.
  
  

A retrofit approach to automation and electrification carries two additional benefits compared to new electric, autonomous vehicles purchased from original equipment manufacturers. First, retrofitting enables companies to upgrade their existing mixed fleets. This means companies like Obayashi do not need to decommission their existing vehicles prematurely and purchase brand new equipment in order to begin reaping the benefits of autonomy and electrification. This is both more cost-effective and more practical than replacing entire fleets of usable equipment. Second, the ability to upgrade existing equipment enables companies to take matters into their own hands instead of waiting for OEMs to produce the exact autonomous, electric equipment that they need. This accelerates the transformation for companies like Obayashi, who can now be proactive about matters like electrification and demonstrate their commitment to environmental issues while driving corporate value. 

Electrification in heavy vehicles is still in the early stages. But with maturing technology, new government incentives, evolving regulation, and a decreasing cost of ownership, the stars are aligning for this technology to take off in a meaningful way.  The trend toward electrification, particularly when combined with autonomy, will fundamentally change how industries like construction operate. This project with SafeAI and Obayashi Corporation will provide a glimpse of what a smarter, more productive, more sustainable future will look like. 

In an effort to better understand the synergy between autonomy and electrification, SafeAI collaboratively authored a whitepaper on the interplay between the two technologies and how they can transform construction and mine sites. The report explores the benefits of autonomy and electrification independently, the advantages of combining them, and the impact companies like Obayashi Corporation can expect with autonomous, electric fleets. This research is all part of a collaboration to not only deploy an electric, autonomous fleet, but also to create a thoughtful, practical roadmap for widespread deployment across the construction industry. The report also examines the value of autonomy and electrification in the mining industry. 

“Alone, autonomy creates safer, more connected, and more productive construction sites. Alone, electrification creates more efficient, more cost-effective, and more sustainable construction sites. Each is powerful on its own, but together they are transformative,” said Bibhrajit Halder, founder and CEO of SafeAI. “At SafeAI, we’re bullish on the combination. We know the future of construction is both autonomous and electric, and we want to be at the forefront of driving that transition. These initiatives—to both fully understand and to actually deploy autonomous, electric fleets—will be instrumental in making our vision for a safe, productive, sustainable future a reality.”

To learn more and download the whitepaper, visit here: