Yanmar creates excavator of the future

First published at bauma - April 11, 2019

Yanmar created its eFuzion concept vehicle to show its in-house technology capability

With its concept eFuzion machine, Japanese manufacturer Yanmar is demonstrating how a raft of developing technologies can be combined on the excavator of the future. And there isn’t a diesel engine in sight.

“The concept vehicle combines robotics, vision and autonomous ways of working,” said Andreas Hactergal, sales and marketing director for Yanmar Construction Equipment Europe. “The drive train is electric, the actuators, everything is electric.”

The eFuzion demonstrates its skills by selecting red balls from a mixture of red and white ones, using its fine precision motor control and a robotic arm. It then positions each red ball in another box to gradually create the Yanmar logo. According to Yanmar, this shows how a machine could perform an excavation task autonomously, while avoiding or overcoming obstacles.

With six R&D centres around the world, the wider Yanmar Group is already using some of these technologies in other sectors. For example, it launched an autonomous tractor in Japan last year and uses remote sensing and automatic drones in the agricultural sectors.

However, managing director for Yanmar Construction Equipment Europe Alessandro Bellisimi was keen to emphasise that the eFuzion would not be in production any time soon. “We want to show all the capabilities of the company, but we believe that the market is not yet ready for such a machine.”

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