Programs & Labs
Even a blizzard is no match for 'superplow'
The state's 30-ton prototype truck has joystick-controlled blades and a guidance system that keeps an eye out for other vehicles
By Chuck Haga, Star-Tribune Staff Writer
Originally published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune Saturday, February 10, 2001
John Scharffbillig of the Minnesota Department of Transportation took the state's first high-tech snowplow truck for a spin. A display like a video-arcade game shows the road ahead accurately in a whiteout.
A tombstone shape, above, indicates the position of another vehicle or an obstacle.
He calls it his "big boy toy," but it's as serious as sleet blowing sideways.
John Scharffbillig cruised down Hwy. 101 between Rogers and Elk River Friday, riding high on the future of snowplowing in Minnesota: a prototype 30-ton machine that knows exactly where it is, where the road ahead lies - and whether anybody's coming up fast from behind.
"It's like going from a typewriter to a computer," said Scharffbillig, highway maintenance supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Transportation and a snowplow driver for 22 years.
It looks like an ordinary snowplow until you climb inside and check out the onboard computers, the 6-inch satellite dish, the video cameras and the screen that drops in front of the driver to show arcade-like images of road divider strips, signs and shoulders.
Passing cars and trucks - and cows, bridge abutments and flipped SUVs, if there are any - appear on the screen as tombstones: obstacles to be avoided. Pistol-grip joysticks control the plow's blades. In time, the "superplow" will carry tanks with three different deicing liquids, for different temperatures, dropped precisely by sensors that monitor road and atmospheric conditions.
Where's the cannon? Where are the controls for the .50-caliber machine guns?
No guns, Scharffbillig said, smiling. "But it's the same technology the military uses to land airplanes."
The trucks cost about $100,000. The computer technology adds about $10,000, but Scharffbillig said the investment should be more than offset by gains in safety and efficiency.
The state transportation department has a fleet of 950 snowplows, including about 250 in the Twin Cities metro area.
"But you don't need this stuff in every truck," Scharffbillig said.
Voice-activated, maybe
Highway departments in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania also are experimenting with the high-tech snowplows, which will clear roads faster, better and more safely. One truck in Wisconsin's Barron County has voice-activated controls, but computer glitches have kept it in the garage.
"We've lost radar and had some other problems," Scharffbillig said. "We have this set up to test everything, so some of it is not field-hardened. When we're plowing, that jostles the radar quite a lot."
Wisconsin has eight of the new trucks so far, Iowa 18. Minnesota's lone superplow will be joined by four more prototypes next fall. The global-positioning and other equipment also will be tested in a State Patrol car and an ambulance in Hutchinson, Minn.
U.S. highway researchers traveled to Europe and Asia to learn the latest in plowing techniques and technology. From Germany, "superplow" borrows spoilers that funnel snow clouds under the truck instead of into traffic. The Japanese have been using GPS systems to guide trucks and monitor their effectiveness.
The global positioning system locates the truck to within about 25 meters. Then a differential radar, tuned to a system mounted on a tower a few miles away, corrects the spotting to within a few centimeters. Drawing on maps in a database, a computer projects the road ahead - center stripes, turns, intersections - onto the screen in front of the driver: a moving overlay that will show the driver where to go even in whiteout conditions.
"It's like driving on a road with fresh-painted divider lines," Scharffbillig said. "We had 20 operators drive this truck with curtains on all the windows - totally blind. They each drove a four-mile course with hairpin curves, right-angle curves and an S-curve, and we had only one small incident.
"All the technology seemed a little overwhelming at first," he said. "And we're doing a lot of tests to see whether we're giving the operators too much information, or whether they're getting eyestrain. "But the more I used it, the more comfortable it felt. It's a trust thing. I did a road test where I drove first without the new equipment on. Then I did the same course using it. You could see by my tracks that the truck did better than I did. That's what sold me."
Watching their rear
The truck also carries radar and ultra-bright strobe lights against the snowplow driver's most common danger: vehicles approaching too fast from the rear. An alarm sounds in the cab "so the operator knows to speed up or take evasive action," Scharffbillig said.
"I was rear-ended once when I was clearing a left lane," he said. "It's not a pleasant sight to see someone wedged under your truck." If the truck starts to drift out of its lane, the driver's seat oscillates. "It's like running over a rumble strip on the outside of the lane," he said.
The snowplow's cab is spacious, the seats comfortable - a far cry from Scharffbillig's "office" two decades ago.
"When I started driving plows, the seats were hard, we shifted with a stick, we had a steering wheel like a bus, and we had just a couple of wrenches in our box," he said. "Now we have lots of tools."
Chuck Haga can be contacted at crhaga@startribune.com.
Copyright 2001 Star Tribune. Republished with permission of Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. Paul. No further republication is permitted without the written consent of the Star Tribune.