kai_webb91•2mo agoMost Upvoted

Vent: The push for 100% GPS bucket control on every new dredge is a mistake

I keep seeing specs from yards like the one in Mobile that demand full automation for every cut, but it kills the feel for the material. You lose the subtle feedback through the sticks that tells you when you've hit a clay layer or a buried timber pile. Has anyone else had a job where the computer kept trying to dig through something it just couldn't read?

4 comments

4 Comments

jakeb812mo ago

Man, my buddy watched his dredge try to chew through an old concrete slab for an hour.

karenb972mo ago

My last job felt like trying to teach a robot to tie its shoes. The system kept insisting the rock ledge was just "dense silt.

anna4912mo ago

Honestly used to think those smart systems were just hype. Tbh watching a drill rig argue with itself over gravel versus bedrock changed my mind. Ngl it's kinda funny until you're the one waiting on a machine that's confidently wrong. Makes you wonder what else it's getting totally backwards.

jamieb801mo ago

We had a rig do that on a site last year. The operator finally just overrode the auto-classify and manually logged it as bedrock after the third core sample. Sometimes you gotta tell the machine it's seeing a shoe, not a weirdly shaped sock. Took a bit of arguing with the project manager too, but the data was way more useful after that.