Mixed Fleet project will show the way to the future work sites. Â This new 3-year and ten million euros project is a big step to seamless collaboration between autonomous work machines and humans on the same site.
It is obvious that joint and flexible operations on work sites will be the next major trend in mobile work machine automation. It is characterized by connecting autonomous machines from various manufacturers to the common control as well as the collaboration of manual and automatic machines.
Autonomous machines and human worker can work side by side in the same task so that the creativity and flexibility of  a human and power and safety of a machine will be combined in most effcient way.
All the machines and systems shall be easily implemented connected into the collaboration by  on-site personnel, without demanding programming or in-depth knowledge of the individual machine systems. This requires totally new software tools and methods to put togeher machines of different types and manufacturers.  Additionally safety and situational awareness need to be brought into a new level in these mixed fleet environments.
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All these requirements are new and will be examined and developed in Mixd Fleet project. Four companies and two research organisations will do a pioneering work, but in fact more than dozen other companies have been indicated the importance of optimizing work routines in multimachine fleets and getting machines and humans working together in their business.
FIMA is coordinating the collaboration between partners in the project, but also helping all its members to get close to the new concepts which will be created during the project. Project partners open their demo sites and factories for testing the concepts in real life. These demos will be showroom of the future for the whole work machine industry!
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Today autonomous machines are only a minor part of turnover even in the most advanced companies. They are like high end projects showing the technology capability of the company, but is not really a mainstream business yet. The change over from manual operated machines to fully automated fleets is a big step to take on one time.
Mixed Fleet project will provide concepts to move on with smaller but faster steps by leaving some work for humans to do. These concepts will also enable automation of smaller and more simple machines, and in that way will add more value to volume products.