Loadout Control Offers Peace of Mind for Hall Contracting
BY Sandy Lender
Loadout control offers peace of mind for Hall Contracting’s plant operations
The team at Stansteel Hotmix Parts & Service, Louisville, Kentucky, met up with Robert Schedko, a plant operator for Hall Contracting of Kentucky, to assess the performance of a new loadout system. The producer had installed the OEM’s Look, Lock ’n Load technology, and the team wished to check in to share Schedko’s experience with the industry.
Schedko confirmed in an online interview that Hall had the system installed at the end of 2023/beginning of 2024 and, “Since we have used it, we have had zero hood hits and zero spills on the deck for this whole season.”
Let’s look at how that works and what it means for the producer.
A controls engineer for the OEM shared the “Look Lock and Load Safety Loadout Truck Recognition System,” via a smart computer, uses “computer vision” to mathematically use images to train its neural network. When a haul truck pulls up to the silos, the Look, Lock ’n Load system digitally scans an image of the incoming truck and differentiates between the truck’s cab and bed. The display for the plant operator indicates a red zone for the cab and a green zone for the loading bed. More than that, the system can lock out the silo gates in the red zone.
Robert Schedko is a plant operator for Hall Contracting.
Basically, if you see two green lights on your display screen, you’re ready to load, Schedko shared in his online interview. If you don’t have two green lights on your display screen, you need to look at your lines and see where errors are happening. He explained that the iteration of Look, Lock ’n Load that Hall had installed locks out all the silos until a truck pulls under the one it’s supposed to load from. Then only the one selected is unlocked; the others remain locked.
“Before the Look, Lock ’n Load, you could dump any time from any silo whether there was a truck on the scales or not,” Schedko said. “It didn’t detect weight. It didn’t detect if there was even anything there that was supposed to be there. This here will actually look out and if it sees a cab of a truck or a person, it shuts it down to where nothing will open. It has to have a truck bed underneath the silo for it to work or another device designed to receive asphalt; not a hood or a cab. This has added a whole new field of safety that we had none of before with our basic loadout system.”
That kind of pressure weighs on the operator who’s monitoring 100+ loads per day along with his other responsibilities.
Lennie Loesch, the president and CEO of Stansteel Hotmix Parts & Service, reminded us, “Human plant operators do not just ‘run machines by pushing buttons.’ They manage dynamic plant systems with moving parts, volatile materials and human factors. Humans watch for unsafe conditions, respond to alerts, coordinate with ground crews and keep an eye on everything using their sight, hearing, smell and their irreplicable human intuition.”
With the management of those dynamic yet repetitive systems comes unintentional complacency. It’s not difficult to miss a step in a process you’ve executed a few dozen times in a day.
When trucks approach the scales, Schedko has a smart computer system assisting in lining everything up and preventing gates from opening until it’s safe to load.
“We have done over 3,000 tons in one day, about 120 loads,” Schedko said. “That’s 120 opportunities for a mistake. The odds aren’t good for the operator running by himself to not make a mistake…and sometimes it’s not even the operator making the mistake. It could be a truck driver driving out from underneath of [the silo].”
Schedko has seen it happen.
“I’ve had a truck drive out and [the Look, Lock ’n Load system] shut the doors and I had maybe two shovels worth of mix on the side on the floor.”
The former loadout system Schedko had been working with required updates but wasn’t giving him confidence. “Loading trucks has always been quite the stress for us because of having a loadout system you couldn’t trust. You had to be the one that had to manage all the security and safety because of that. The [new] system takes that burden off of us.”
“We are honored to have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a patent on the AI-based Look, Lock ’n Load System,” Loesch said. “It uses AI technology to stop accidentally dumping silo discharge onto the cabs and hoods, or past the tail gate of trucks loading out. It removes the operator’s repetitive or tedious task of making a decision—up to several hundred times a day—that the trucks are lined up properly under the correct silo gates.”
“My favorite part about the system is having something there to watch out for me; basically, another set of eyes,” Schedko said. “It’s like having another person that all they do is watch and make sure things get loaded safely and having that has taken a lot of stress off of me doing my job.
“The Look, Lock ’n Load system has allowed me to step away and do other things with a lot more peace of mind. Before, I still had to do that stuff but it was more of my head was spinning in circles trying to stay with what I’m doing and watch the loadout…now I can rely on the Look, Lock ’n Load to handle a lot of the ‘what ifs’ or ‘what if something goes wrong.’ It handles that.”