Dive Brief:
- Caterpillar and Australia-based innovation organization Unearthed will sponsor a 54-hour hackathon from Sept. 23-25, 2016 in San Francisco designed to provide solutions to improve truck operator performance in the mining industry.
- Hackathon participants will use large datasets provided by Caterpillar to investigate how the information could be used to predict problems, boost operator performance, reduce misuse of machines and reward optimal behavior.
- The effort is intended to produce prototype products and ideas that augment traditional equipment operator training with real-time data and analytics.
Dive Insight:
It makes sense for the mining industry to be one of the first to benefit from a Silicon-Valley hackathon for equipment operators — the sector has been a leading adopter of autonomous vehicles for ore-loading and surface-mining. Despite construction's slow progression to adopt autonomous vehicle technology, advancements in the space are starting to seep into the industry.
Events like the AEC Hackathon — with planned events in Paris, Washington, DC, Seattle, Singapore and even Silicon Valley — are already producing viable innovations to drone, virtual reality and even hard hat technologies for construction.
Hackathons provide major global organizations like Caterpillar with access to new levels of construction technology R&D in exchange for providing developers and innovators with open-source access to data sets and system processes. Call it incubator or accelerator, the hopeful result is to pit entrepreneurial brawn against historically long product and solution development timelines by providing innovators with direct access to data and resources.
