Editor at Large: Behind the Scenes of Cat’s New Trial Video and Its Semi-Autonomous Compact Track Loader
A mining truck the size of a mansion is driving itself around the Sonoran Desert. One of America’s soccer greats, DaMarcus Beasley, is juggling a ball around an obstacle course, which includes tables full of meticulously placed cutlery and glassware. It’s also windy as hell, so I’m constantly pushing my recorder into people’s faces so my interviews aren’t all static and hiss. None of this is too unusual for a Caterpillar press trip.
Caterpillar is one of the most recognizable machine brands in the world for a reason — quality equipment, breadth of product, amazing dealers, cutting-edge technology — but also because the company is constantly pushing the boundaries of how to market and sell earthmoving equipment. In March, I flew out to Tucson, visiting Caterpillar’s Tinaja Hills Demonstration and Learning Center, which sits on 6,500 acres of rolling Arizona desert. The company invited Compact Equipment to visit the movie set of its latest Cat Trial video, which involved (among other things) soccer, autonomy, track loaders and an intense commitment to bold branding strategy.
“No Hands” is the 12th Cat Trial video, and I visited the shoot for two days last March. This concept commercial highlights both an autonomous Cat mining truck and semi-autonomous Cat compact track loader (CTL), showcasing the company’s commitment to driverless machinery. It’s a challenge trial, pitting MLS soccer great and four-time FIFA player DaMarcus Beasley, weaving his way through an obstacle course of equipment, cars, Caterpillar merchandise and dining tables, while a mining truck is doing the same thing — and no hands are involved. The video is embedded above. If you haven’t seen one before, the Cat Trials (see all of them at cat.com/cattrials) are these awesomely creative marketing vids the company has been producing since 2014, when it played a giant game of Jenga with Cat excavators. Fun fact: That game took over 28 hours to play.
“Our whole plan was to play three games of Jenga,” explained J. Archie Lyons, creative director at Caterpillar and mastermind behind these trials. “We were going to shoot three games and edit the best out. One game took us 28 hours, so needless to say, we’ve only ever played one game of giant Jenga.”
That’s wild. It’s the same thing I thought watching a $100K drone fly underneath a moving autonomous mining truck weaving around dinner tables in the desert. This is crazy. It’s what I probably said out loud when interviewing Joe Forcash, Caterpillar robotics technology manager, about the company premiering a semi-autonomous compact track loader. How is that possible on one of Caterpillar’s smallest machines?
“Five years ago, I don’t think we would’ve been able to do a semi-autonomous CTL because the technology had just not evolved yet,” Forcash explained as we watched a driverless mining truck speed up and down desert hills. “The autonomous car space and the ability to have so much more computing platform onboard now is what helped drive, from an external perspective, that cost down and some of the hardware changes we needed to be able to do this. As it continues to evolve, it’s driving our ability to take some of that technology and put it into our products.”
Let’s get into the details of that evolution and why the Cat Trials and autonomous compact equipment aren’t crazy ideas at all but practical and progressive approaches to making and selling the next-generation of off-highway earthmoving equipment.
Trials and Triumphs
Caterpillar is constantly catching my attention. Did you see it launched another Global Operator Challenge? Cat dealers from 30 countries around the world participated in the first Operator Challenge in 2019. I surveyed multiple stages of that machine competition, and it was one of the most epic equipment tournaments I’ve ever seen. At the time, it was Caterpillar’s biggest marketing campaign ever. Whether the company is 3D printing habitats for Mars exploration or sponsoring the Chinese Basketball Association, Caterpillar is always catching my attention for something more than just machines. But no branding move has caught my complete attention like the Cat Trials.
After visiting the “No Hands” trial, it’s hard to believe there are 12 of them. Here are some of the previous concepts: “Gravity” features a monstrous Cat digger driving over $217,000 worth of Cat phones; “Tug of War” has Hafthor Bjornsson (The Mountain in Game of Thrones) going rope-to-rope with a Cat track-type tractor in Reykjavik, Iceland; and “PAC-MAN” uses skid steers in an actual earth maze to recreate a giant-sized version of the arcade classic. How do these ideas come about?
“At the end of the day, the Cat Trials are all about surprising and delighting our customers,” said Lyons. “That’s really what we want to do. We want to show off our features and benefits like everybody else, but we want to do it in a way that’s going to cut through the marketing clutter and get people to stop and learn more.”
What are the key ingredients?
“The trials really need to focus on [1] our products, services and technology, and then [2] we feel we need to have a relevant business topic,” continued Lyons. “Those are obvious, but for us, we feel the magic is the top of the triangle. It’s [3] really weaving in that pop culture element. That’s what sets it apart from just another product video to be a Cat Trial — where people are going to look and learn. There’s a lot of ripple effects. It helps bring influencers into the funnel. It helps with employee recruitment. So, for Cat Trial 12, when we pitched it, we ran it through this funnel. The head, the heart, the gut. We want to make sure it connects with all three in order to make the idea successful in our mind.”
These trials are mainly focused on social media marketing, and each new one continues to raise the bar for marketing success. Combined, the original eight trials generated 18 million lifetime views, according to Lyons. “I mean, we were very happy with that number,” he said. “We thought that was amazing. Then, in the first 90 days, ‘PAC-MAN’ did 26 million views. ‘Tech Tests’ [Trial 10] in the first 90 days did 19 million views, and ‘Hot Wheels’ [Trial 11] did 35 million views in the first 90 days.”
“No Hands” is up next. Autonomous construction equipment is the focus of this latest trial. Caterpillar has long been recognized as the industry leader in this category with the world’s largest autonomous fleet of haul trucks. In February, Caterpillar announced it had over 500 Cat autonomous trucks in operation worldwide. Now, the company is scaling its autonomous tech to its most popular category of compact equipment — track loaders. “No Hands” features a Cat 794 autonomous mining truck and a Cat semiautonomous Cat 299D3 compact track loader, racing through an obstacle course against soccer icon Beasley, whose played for everyone from the Chicago Fire to Manchester City (he’s currently a co-owner of Indiana’s Fort Wayne FC, an USL League 2 club). What’s the connection between soccer and autonomy?
“Technology has moved the game,” said Beasley, seeing the connection, talking between takes. “I think it’s very important. Going back to the old days in the 2000s, when I started, you didn’t use a heart monitor. You couldn’t figure out how many steps you took. You had to go count for a minute. You got 56. Okay, you’re fit. You’re ready to play. You’re under 50. You can’t play. You got to run more. Now you have watches and sports bras with all this technology to track a player’s vitals. So yeah, technology has moved the game, and I think the game has moved with technology. The data that’s available to these clubs now is amazing. You have to embrace it.”
Soccer, perhaps called football where you’re from, also connects to a worldwide audience.
“If you want to talk about a pastime that our customers love and that’s global, that’s soccer,” said Lyons. “When you watch it, as you watch players go down the field, there’s this finesse. There’s a streamlined, agile approach to how they move a ball down a course. That’s what we want to juxtapose to a large mining truck and also to our CTL that we have for autonomy. People might consider these clunky pieces of equipment. How can they be as precise as soccer players and how can they show that level of precision you can get with autonomy? So, Cat Trial 12 is called ‘No Hands.’”
Enjoy it above.
Compact track loaders are the most popular category of compact equipment in America. Learn why with loads of track loader features right here.
Tech and Compact Track Loaders
Automation isn’t new to Cat compact track loaders. As much as a semi-autonomous compact track loader blew me away, Caterpillar specifically has been tech’ing up its lineup for years. The latest example: Cat Smart attachments now include a dozer blade, grader blade, backhoe and cold planer. Smart attachments add significant versatility to Cat 299D3 Series skid steers and track loaders. The control systems for these Smart attachments allow easy adapting of the host machine’s standard controls to precisely match the recognized Smart Attachment’s control needs. For instance, the Smart Dozer Blade attachment unlocks special display screens that allow the operator to select how the blade is controlled. The blade even has an assist feature that allows the operator to select a blade slope and to recall that setting at the touch of a joystick button. A double press on the memory button will mirror the memorized blade slope on the other side.
Cat compact track loaders offer lots of automation — grade control, ride control, parallel lift, returnable kickouts, creep control and onward. This technology has migrated down from Caterpillar’s bigger equipment categories, and it’s also come from synergies and acquisitions of outside companies.
“We acquired Marble about two years ago,” said Forcash. “We had the mining technology. We had Cat Command technology [Caterpillar’s brand of remote control, semi-autonomous or fully autonomous equipment systems], but we really needed to be able to run it in an environment that had no infrastructure. We needed to be able to run this technology in an environment that was complex and dynamic, and with an ability to understand that dynamic world, how to make decisions and everything. So, Marble was operating delivery robots on the streets of San Francisco. Ultimately, they pivoted to work on our product and eventually we acquired them. A lot of what you see on the CTL are those three pillars. The technology we’ve leveraged from the trucks, the Command for remote control and the Marble autonomy intelligence.”
At a mine site, autonomous vehicles are connected to a network in order to function properly together. For compact track loaders, Caterpillar needed to develop a system that had no reliance on a network, so everything needed to be onboarded onto the actual loader.
With semi-autonomous technology for track loaders, the equipment still requires directions, oversight and remote-control operation from an operator. The first application for this technology came at a solar farm looking to move solar panels and other installation gear over acres of utility farm. In this application, the operator uses a tablet controller as a remote control. The worker uses the joysticks to remotely control and lift a pallet, and then uses the tablet to tell the track loader where to go. The CTL then autonomously drives, avoiding obstacles, and delivers its drop-off sequence and returns.
What other jobsites might attract semi-autonomous compact track loaders?
“If a job is repetitive, there’s a possible application for autonomy,” said Forcash, “but there are many other building blocks that we have available to help customers. Take remote control, for example. Maybe you’ve got a potentially hazardous environment from which you want to protect an operator. Maybe it is repetitive, but you’re not quite ready for autonomy. You start to learn the processes, and consider how can I operate a jobsite without people in the machines? How do I ensure people around the jobsite are safe? We work with our customers to weave together people, process and technology for their unique needs to achieve the maximum benefits.”
Luckily, contractors have time to study and identify opportunities to integrate remote control and semi-autonomous technologies, to increase the safety, efficiency and productivity of their projects. This driverless Cat track loader isn’t on the commercial market just yet.
“I can’t speak to availability,” said Forcash. “All I can say is we’ll continue to work with customers, to learn from their applications and mature the product.”
There’s More to Come
During the same week as Cat Trial 12 in March, Caterpillar was shooting another trial video, which has another amazing premise. I can’t wait to share it. At the same time, Caterpillar continues to release cool tech for its compact equipment from Cat Command for skid steers to Stick Steer on its Next Gen mini hydraulic excavators. These two pillars — progressive technology and innovative marketing strategy — will continue to fortify the Caterpillar brand as one of the most forward-thinking in the world. We’ll keep you updated on its next move.
Keith Gribbins is publisher of Compact Equipment.
