Fully autonomous construction and mining machines are not science fiction anymore. For special applications, these types of machinery are well known for several years. The construction and mining industries are ripe for innovative product and service offers, including automated and fully autonomous machines at a larger scale. Nevertheless, commercially available autonomous machines for the main markets are still rare. Driven by the advancements in sensor technology, increased connectivity, and on-board computational capabilities, automation of machine functions and subsystems led to the development of advanced operator-assistant functions in certain fields like material handling, predictive maintenance, and operator guidance. Semi-automated machines, supporting the machine operator during normal operation, are well accepted by users and customers and show beneficial effects on the productivity of the machine and the overall work process. The purpose of this thesis is to generate a deeper understanding of the specific requirements needed to support the design decisions during the development of fully autonomous machines. Complementary, deeper insights into the efficient collaboration between autonomous machines and human collaborators are explored.

The thesis summarizes the research performed by the author, as an industrial Ph.D. student and Specialist for Intelligent Machines at Volvo Construction Equipment. Performed research comprises the investigation of the state-of-the-art approaches in the automation of machines and dedicated functions with special emphasis on the connectivity of the different systems and components up to the site management solution. Further, the work includes the exploration of data-mining through early experience prototyping as a step towards data-driven design of a product-service system. In additional the research covered the support of on-site collaboration between autonomous machines and humans by investigating team behavior and trust development among humans.

Conclusions from this work are that autonomous machine design requires new sets of requirements to support early decision making during the development process. Dedicated data collection based on different methods such as, data-mining, needfinding, and observations, supported by multiple physical and virtual artifacts can generate useful data to support the decision-making. Trust between humans and machines, and the preconditions of developing this trust need to be captured as specific requirements. To support further development in the area of autonomous machine design, an interaction model had been proposed to map possible interactions of an autonomous machine with objects and collaborators within the same work area. To capture the different nature of the possible interactions, several levels had been introduced to enable the distinction between cognitive, and physical, as well as intended, and unintended interactions.

Customers across all sectors have increasing expectations (e.g. value, efficiency, availability, quality, etc.) and expanding needs which traditional business models fail to address simultaneously and stand-alone products cannot be expected to solve. To expand the value provided to customers, manufacturers have begun adding services to their products through servitization. Similarly, service providers have begun adding products to expand their ability to capture market capacity. The end coupled product and service solutions have been classified as Product Service System (PSS) solutions. The challenge lies in defaulting to existing products or services as the starting point since these solutions can carry forward inefficiencies or limitations of legacy solutions. There is a recent proposal to integrate PSS design into a single process, rather than using separate design flows for products, services, and systems. This approach involves intentionally designing all elements together at the same time. Ideally, this approach will allow the most efficient existing and new products or services to be combined into a solution which produces exponentially more value than the sum of the individual elements. Realigning all components of a PSS from inception towards a function provides an opportunity to escape current product limitations and explore new solutions with potentially higher value. This approach becomes an increasingly wicked challenge of having a transformative view of the future solution scenario at the conceptual start of the design process while navigating the increased ambiguity brought forth due to the nature of PSS solution variability. A core tenet of the Design Thinking (DT) mindset prescribes extensive use of physical prototypes as a means to “dance with ambiguity” encouraging generative exploration in the early conceptual phases of design. This “show don’t tell” tenet of DT is incorporated in a novel way into what this research will define as "Intentional PSS design” through physical system prototypes to accomplish two primary objectives; Enabling internal consensus in a project team through rapid design space exploration and provoking Generative Design Questions from the various potential stakeholders up and down the future value chain. These prototypes enable co-creation of conceptual solutions that may not be technically possible today, but have enough impact potential to warrant deeper exploration and refinement to enable their evolution.    

The aim of this thesis is to explore the phenomenon of creating and utilizing physical prototypes in the conceptual phase of PSS design. The initial context and case studies are within the domain of construction equipment manufacturing. The resulting work produced a functional scale prototype of a future solution yielding valuable gains in co-creation and GDQs. Generating this prototype and understanding its impacts in the conceptual phase of the PSS design process is the phenomenon in question for the first half of the research. The second half of the research focuses on how to enable other designers to replicate the observed   prototyping qualities through various experimental means delivered via workshops.  

The work was performed in collaboration with a construction equipment manufacturer, conducting an exploration into the impacts of shifting towards autonomous electric machinery at a demonstrator production site. The thesis first depicts how the prototyping around the ancillary impacts and solutions leads to greater engagement from stakeholders regarding the new concepts. The later portion explores two methodological attempts at generalizing the process behind the creation of the demonstrator scale site as a boundary object for early phase exploration that are previously not accessible through current practices. This leads to the testing of the method in a broader perspective to represent tangible and intangible elements in a way that facilitates concept design decisions in interdisciplinary team settings. The thesis concludes by exploring the potential of utilizing the new workshop-based processes to move from an ambiguous asipirational goal towards an uncertain transformative PSS solution concept anchored by physical representations aiding concept generation, refinement and selection.