Mevea Seminar 2019
16 March 2020
On October 3rd, 2019, Jake Rankin attended The Mevea Seminar 2019 to discuss the applications of Reinforcement Learning on excavation.
The full event can be found on Mevea’s website at https://mevea.com/news-events/news/mevea-seminar-2019-summary/.
The conference took place at the Scandic Helsinki Aviacongress and have over 250 people from 100 different companies attended. The primary meetings were with Mevea software developers to discuss new solutions for reinforcement learning and soil-tool modelling as this was a software specific to the project.
As well as Mevea researchers, it was a great opportunity to discuss ideas with fellow PhD students and industry experts to understand the challenges they face. Several talks were held, with interesting talks from JCB and Liebherr on their autonomy challenges and how Mevea’s software helped to address them.
Another reason for attending was to present research done using Mevea’s software. After an overview on the challenges of the construction industry and an overview on reinforcement learning, project work was described as well as preliminary results of the study including initial data collection on Mevea’s digital twin and excavation work performed. This helped further understanding of the target audience for reinforcement learning and the follow-up meeting with Mevea helped establish future project work that could help both the project and Mevea.
This was an interesting and valuable opportunity that helped to develop confidence and networking. A follow-up presentation is planned for October 2020 with more emphasis on technical delivery.