Products & Equipment Heavy Equipment
Teleo’s autonomous heavy construction vehicles to launch on active job site

PALO ALTO, Calif. — A Florida-based construction company will be the first to use autonomous technology produced by Teleo on an active job site.

The manufacturer of heavy construction equipment announced the sale of 42 new autonomous machines bought by eight construction customers. Among those customers was Florida’s Tomahawk Construction, who will be the first to deploy the vehicles in December.

The company will use articulated dump trucks for hauling construction materials on a Naples, Fla. job site. The autonomous feature will operate through point-to-point operation of the remote-controlled trucks.

“Operators driving dump trucks spend the majority of their time tramming from one point to another. By automating the tramming portion, one operator can run multiple machines simultaneously, multiplying their productivity,” Teleo said in a release.

The physical dumping of the trucks will be controlled by one operator working from a command centre.

Teleo remote-controlled systems can be retrofitted on existing construction vehicles. Photo provided by Teleo.

The company will be using 12 trucks total on the job site, rolling them out over a series of months.

Teleo says transitioning jobs to autonomous operation will help job sites with labour shortages in the construction industry by not only combining tasks, but attracting more workers.

“By transitioning these roles from the field to a remote command center, [we’re] creating a safe and comfortable work environment. This makes the role of the operator more attractive to the next generation, making it easier to recruit, train and deploy skilled employees, while also making the job more accessible,” the company said.

Teleo’s approach to equipment forgoes manufacturing in favour of retrofitting existing heavy construction equipment, making the vehicles autonomous and remote-controlled. Their supervised autonomy technology lets contractors operate existing heavy equipment without an operator in the cab.

Teleo was founded in 2019 by CEO Vinay Shet and CTO Rom Clement, who both led autonomous vehicle teams at Lyft and helped develop Street View and other foundational technologies at Google.

Teleo demonstrated its technology in March 2023 at CONEXPO in Las Vegas, Nev.