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Automating railcar loading for safety and efficiency
9 Plays6 months ago
In the latest episode of the Feed Grain Podcast, host Steven Kilger talks to Tom Boehm president and CEO of Rayhawk. Rayhawk has design a system to completely automate the rail loading process at grain elevators. This means that no employees have to be on top of railcars improving safety, efficiency and hopefully the job satisfaction of your team.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everybody, my name is Stephen Kilgurn. I'm the managing editor of Feeding Grain magazine and the host of the Feeding Grain podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we dive deep into the issues affecting the feed manufacturing, grain handling, and allied industries. Today's episode is brought to you by the Binwip from Numat Systems. The powerful dual impact Binwip removes the toughest buildup and blockages into industrial storage silos without
00:00:24
Speaker
hazardous silo entry. Learn more today at binwhip.com.
00:00:48
Speaker
latches after it's done. This means that no employees have to be on top of rail cars during loading, improving safety, efficiency, and hopefully the job satisfaction of your team. I hope you enjoy the interview. If you want to help out with the podcast and are listening to this in a podcasting app, please rate us and subscribe. If you're listening online, sign up for the Feeding Grain newsletter Industry Watch to see all the latest podcasts and stay up to date with the latest news from around the industry.
00:01:11
Speaker
Now, on to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Rayhawk Technologies Autonomous System Overview
00:01:15
Speaker
So for any listeners out there that might not be aware of what you and Ray Hawk do, you mind telling us a little more about yourself and what you kind of do in the industry?
00:01:24
Speaker
Thanks a lot for having me here today, Stephen. I'd be very happy to talk to you a little bit more about Rayhawk technologies and explain the wonderful technology that we've created. Now, what we've done is we've taken the latest in technology that's available in hardware and software, and we've worked together to create an autonomous solution to open and close top-filled, granular-style rail cars. Now, what this technology does is it allows us to remove the human being off of the top of the rail car.
00:01:52
Speaker
Now for decades, human beings have been on top of real cars, bending over opening latches, tied off using the latest of fall protection systems.
00:02:01
Speaker
But again, they're still working in the elements. They're working in the wind and the rain in some conditions of snow. And there's hazards. There's lower back strains. There's slips and trips. There's twisted ankles. You're working up at a height that isn't a great place to be. And thankfully, with today's technology, with what we've done with it, with the wonderful people we have working for us, we've been able to create a solution that's been able to remove the need to have that human being in harm's way on top of a rail car.
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, definitely. And I think for safety at females, grain elevators, any of these kinds of big agricultural places, the focus is always on engulfments and things like that. But the loading of real car, that's got to be a huge amount of just the day to day injuries that people have. I mean, it's a monotonous task that you're doing over and over again.
00:02:47
Speaker
Again, mistakes get made. So the ability to kind of automate it, it's not only kind of seems like it's going to save people so much time, it's going to save them so much money. It's got to be able to make their employees so much safety and free them up to do so many other things. And hopefully we can get away from this grind that we have at grain elevators, you know, where people are expected to kind of come in when the rail comes in and that's what we focus everything around.
00:03:12
Speaker
So it's a fantastic idea. What inspired you guys to develop this kind of Ray
Safety in Rail Car Operations
00:03:17
Speaker
Hawk system? How has it evolved over time? Cause when you showed it off at Jeeps this year, I mean, you kind of the talk of the trade show, at least those first couple of days, I tried to get to your booth and I had a real hard time getting over there. We were very, very pleased with, with the response of the community of the agricultural community at Jeeps this year. It was just such a wonderful experience. You know, two years ago and in 2022, I traveled down to the Jeeps.
00:03:39
Speaker
event in Kansas Jeeps Exchange. And I was just so impressed with the hospitality of the other exhibitors, the people that attend that show. It was just a really warm climate and everybody was more than happy to have a great conversation to help out. So that really paved the way for us to want to be there this year. And are we ever happy that we did to appoint the attendance at the booth, the feedback we got from industry as far as, you know, yes, these are these are known issues. This is this is arguably the issue that nobody wants to talk about because there has never been a solution.
00:04:08
Speaker
And now that there is the excitement and the lineup of people that were at our booth almost non-stop, it's a testament to that. The industry is excited to see finally there's a solution here where we can get around this. So when you talk about the safety, it's easy to see. You know, you have people working at heights and you're working and you're walking, you're jumping from car to car, rail car to rail car.
00:04:31
Speaker
And yes, you're tied off to a fall restraining system above, but that doesn't make it any better if you slip and fall either inside the car or off the car. You could be hanging there for a while until somebody can come and rescue you, because when you're in fall restraint, you can't self-rescue. There's no ability to somehow grab the binder and tied your back and pull yourself up. So it does require other people to intervene, and hanging in a five-point harness is not good for you either. There's many medical professionals out there that can tell you the dangers of hanging in a suspended mode like that.
00:05:01
Speaker
And that's all while considering that you didn't hurt yourself when you fell. We've heard stories where people slip and fall off the rail car and they get a bit of a pendulum effect and they smash into the side of the rail car or they hit something else on the way down. And this could be bumps and bruises. It could be broken bones or it could even potentially be a fatality.
00:05:19
Speaker
None of which are great. You know, when we really look at what's going on in industry and we look at what we're capable of as human beings and how technology has been growing and at an increasing rate around us, why are we not taking our people and doing more meaningful activities and automating the ones that potentially create safety risks or business risks?
00:05:40
Speaker
And that can be automated. And that's really what this is about now is that we now have somebody that's available to put into a more meaningful role at the same facility to help increase production, to help keep other areas of the plant, the facility running that may or may not be shut down to allow somebody to be freed up to go load rail cars. This is progress. This is evolution in industry.
00:06:02
Speaker
And, you know, it means so many more things. The safety piece is just one of those pieces along the way. It's like, yes, we want people to come to work and go home in that same condition. And we want people to feel good about working for the companies that we work for. We want people to feel that they're working for not just a progressive company, but for companies that have their safety and their wellbeing as top of mind. At the end of the day, we all compete globally and our agricultural customers and our mining customers are no different.
00:06:28
Speaker
they have to be competitive at that top level best in class most cost per ton and this is a huge stepping stone for them towards that. Yeah especially since the way the industry runs and has one for a really long time is when train cars come in it is an all hands on deck situation and you if you have to work a 16 hour day to get it loaded and out the door cuz you only have a limited amount of time that's what you do and
00:06:54
Speaker
One of the biggest things workers these days ask for and in an industry where people are trying to recruit nonstop because we can't find workers is that kind of quality of life. I mean, and plus who wants to sit up there and load a rail car in rain and sleet and snow on top of there as stuff comes in and no one wants to do that. We all want to be the guy in the booth.
00:07:15
Speaker
But then checking over things and making sure it's all going to plan. That's very well said. And you might also add that in the agriculture, I grew up on a farm and in a family operation, I was quite involved until I was probably in my mid thirties. So I spent my fair share of time in a coal mine and all in grain and so on. And it's been a few years now and have things ever changed. I still am very connected with the farming industry and a lot of friends I grew up with are still farming.
00:07:44
Speaker
When it's time to harvest, it's time to harvest. And you cannot have anything holding you back. And that includes the grain elevators. They need to be able to receive. They need to be able to ship because they've only got so much volume that they can carry as well. And when it really comes down to when the rail companies drop off the rail cars, you've got to be able to load. They've got a schedule to maintain. This is not
00:08:03
Speaker
The amount of leeway in the entire supply chain of taking crops off the field and delivering them to the end facility where they're crushing and turn into flour or if you're export market, whatever it may be, that is such a fine balance now that everything must always keep moving. And if there's a way that rail
How Rayhawk's AI System Works
00:08:23
Speaker
cars could be dropped off,
00:08:24
Speaker
and you can have minimal delays before you can start loading, you know, less reliance on humans to show up to facilitate that process. Then it gives you a little bit of freedom on the business side and on the facility operation side to say, you know what, it's okay that the real company dropped off a unit train and an unplanned or unexpected schedule. We can start loading. We've got the facility, we've got the people, we've got the technology that we don't have to have a small contingent of people
00:08:51
Speaker
to come there to get a goal and maybe just the operator has to be dispatched, right? Yeah. And as conveying speeds have increased so much in recent years, this gives operators options, right? Cause it's only so fast. You have your rail cars being loaded. If you're using people with automation, you're able to, I mean, I know the process takes a little while, but you're able to up that efficiency and get more rail cars through faster.
00:09:17
Speaker
We know that it's a great invention. I think it's going to solve a lot of issues. That's why, you know, you guys were swarmed to teams. How does it work? How does it integrate the vision eyes to do things? How does it automate it? What exactly is the process as a rail car goes through?
00:09:32
Speaker
It's almost a bit futuristic. For years, maybe decades, we've been watching our movies and our blockbuster hits that have utilized facial recognition and digital technology to recognize things. That's here, it's now. The technology that's available with cameras and so on, it's allowed us to
00:09:52
Speaker
Train the computer to understand what is a real car look like? What is a latch look like? What is a lid look like? And by overlaying that with a lot of programming, we've been able to develop something as mechanically simple and very computer complex.
00:10:07
Speaker
So envision this. The Rayhawk system replicates very similar to what you would consider a gantry style overhead crane, if you will. And for those that are familiar with industrial workplaces, this would be quite common for them. But it's made up of legs and long running rails and in a bridge that rolls along those rails and in a tool body that moves back and forth along that bridge.
00:10:31
Speaker
And the camera system is mounted to the system. So as the real car comes into view of the cameras, the camera can right away identify, hey, is that a real car? Is that a top loading real car?
00:10:45
Speaker
got this particular style of lid or latch on it. And as soon as it recognizes what's coming into its operating window, it can then start make decisions, go, okay, is the rail car, is the lid closed? Is the latch closed? Is the lid open or is the latch open? Is it coming in backwards or is it coming in forwards? Once it's able to make those decisions, then it can give the computers other further instructions to say, okay, now we need to open this rail car because
00:11:12
Speaker
further behind us, it wants to go into the filling circuit. So we need to make sure that every latch is opened before the lid is opened. But then we want to make sure all the lids are open and we want to make sure the rail car is clean inside. So we want to scan the inside of the car and make sure that there isn't leftover product from the last shipment or perhaps some contamination in the rail car. This already is the rail car to be filled. And as it moves past the first Rayhawk stage, it goes into the filling circuit where then whatever product is loaded
00:11:41
Speaker
Once it's full and the operator says, you know what, I've got the required amount of weight or volume inside that railcar, it can then go into the closing circuit. Now in the closing circuit, the opposite set of instructions happens. It identifies the railcar as, hey, it's open, all the latches are open, the lids are open, the railcar is full. It can then record any kind of information you may want. Maybe you want a picture of a full railcar, what it looks like when it was full.
00:12:05
Speaker
Then it will go upon closing the lids and closing the latches and even go as far as to seal the latches with a security seal that's required for international shipping standards or to make sure that nobody is tampering with the quality of your goods from point A to point B.
00:12:21
Speaker
And was it possible to do this five, ten years ago? I would say not. The technology just wasn't there. But with the advancement in computerized hardware and camera technologies and so on, we're now able to use this technology
00:12:39
Speaker
employ a bunch of people that are just brilliant with computer science and programming and engineering and put all this together to create a solution for the industry that allows them to basically stand back and watch. In fact, this system, we allow for operators to be involved to enable and disable or to start and stop the process. But in reality, we don't need an operator there to start and stop the process.
00:13:03
Speaker
This is part of the adoption, the adaptation piece is that we want to make sure that the highest level of confidence is maintained. But in reality, this could be deployed in such a fashion that you could have a centralized control system to help run a number of facilities at a time if you so chose.
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah. Cause, and it seems like it goes beyond what I consider automation because automation, when you think about it, it's just like the same process being done over and over again. But this, it sounds a lot more like AI is supposed to be used for it. It's looking at what the situation is and making a decision. It's not just repeating the same actions over and over again. Right. That's right.
00:13:40
Speaker
In fact, when we engage with a client, what we require to do or we insist on doing is we set up cameras on their industrial site for a number of months before we get into deployment of the project. And because we're collecting images that are specific to their sites that we can add that to the training database for the cameras. Now you might wonder, okay, well, why do we do that?
00:14:02
Speaker
Well, every once in a while they may get something, a unique situation. We want to make sure that we capture that. Now a unique situation could be sunlight conditions, it could be dust, it could be shade, it could be rain or snow or even an odd style of rail car that has not been seen in the fleet. There are still some antiquated pieces of equipment out there in the shipping fleets and a customer may rarely see one of those.
00:14:30
Speaker
But if they do receive them and they do need to work with them, we want to be prepared. So that's why we capture so much information so that we can continue to train our computer model and basically make it more intelligent as it goes along. People don't think about that. As a human, you can look at a damaged rail cart later and be like, oh, that's damaged. But as a computer, you kind of have to train it to recognize what damage could be and why it's important. Exactly. Like how much damage is too much damage?
00:14:57
Speaker
I mean, we've got decades of experience working with rail cars and some of those lids have been frozen down over the years or stuck down depending on the product that they're shipping. You know, there's sometimes it could be almost like a heat seal where the product's loaded hot and it's wet and that creates almost a bit of a vacuum on the car that creates that seal to stick.
00:15:16
Speaker
And as a result of that, a large amount of operators have used various tools to break the lids free. Some have resulted in damage to the lids, some damage beyond repair, but I can assure you that all have been bent or damaged even the slightest little bit. So the computer needs to recognize is the lid ruined?
00:15:36
Speaker
Or is this just user damage over years of opening and closing railcar lids? But the railcar lid is in fact still providing a sufficient function of keeping the product contained and secure and free of any outside elements.
00:15:51
Speaker
using tools to open up the real card lid is so, I mean, it's a typical thing of why this is so dangerous too, right? Or guys are up on top using these tools. It's, it's dangerous. It just is dangerous work. And what I love about your system is that how does it make people more safely? Well, it just takes them out of the equation completely. Like it gets them off of the thing that is dangerous because there's only so much we can do to mitigate those risks.
00:16:17
Speaker
We've learned a lot over the last couple of years talking with customers about, you know, how they're currently opening those stuck lids. And if there's one thing I can say for sure that there's been no lack of ingenuity when it comes to how to open a stuck lid. We've seen everything from two by fours to crowbars to winches to jacks to pry bars in entertainment. And but all of them require a certain amount of complexity at times. But more often than not, physical effort that when you're
00:16:47
Speaker
If you're standing up 1315 feet in the air and you're leveraging something, and there's certain elements that are out of your control, one of which is when will that lid pop free? And if it pops free and you're prying and leaning on some kind of a moment arm to get it to break free.
00:17:04
Speaker
Where's your body weight going? Chances are it's going off the side of the car. So it's just amazing that more people are not injured by utilizing some of these makeshift devices to deal just with the problem of stuck lids.
00:17:20
Speaker
I mean, people probably do get injured, but it's their minor, right? They're not big enough to get attention of OSHA or anybody
Commercialization and Industry Adoption
00:17:25
Speaker
else. So who knows how many people who have just like moved that tool the wrong way and ended up bruising the side of their arm or, you know, landing on their tailbone on the car, damaging that, like all those little injuries that never get reported happen all the time around real cars. So that's why this is kind of, it's really cool. And I think that's why the industry is pretty excited about it.
00:17:45
Speaker
Have you guys been installing them in facilities yet? Where are you kind of on the technological pipeline? Are you guys ready? We're ready. We really are. And we're very proud of the fact that one of our local clients is a real innovation-based mindset. And they were an early adopter of the technology and so they've got to install them one of their railway systems and they're monitoring to just assess the success before they take next steps to move forward with further installations.
00:18:12
Speaker
And, and it's statistically we track this, we have dashboarding and so on that we're monitoring quite closely. And it's, it's just a tremendous success. So we're, we're quite happy with that. Where we're at in the commercialization of the product is that we really utilize Jeeps Exchange in 2024 as our launch point.
00:18:29
Speaker
We went down and hosted an ID exchange program and presented there and hosted an exhibit that was, you know, as we spoke about earlier, was very, very successful. And now there's just a lot of conversations going on. We're working with quite a few clients on what it means to their business, what sites would they like to start with, where and why. Are these historically sites that have had higher injury rates? Are they key locations within their shipping network?
00:18:56
Speaker
why this particular location versus the next. And the same time has given us opportunity to learn more about their business as well and why they make certain decisions on safety. What are their primary drivers that are leading them towards this technology today and in a future mindset of where they want to be years down the road.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and I'm sure you're kind of at that stage where there's a lot of excitement and a lot of conversations going off. It's exciting though. I mean, it must be after all these years of development to finally be ready to send these out the door.
00:19:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's, you know, the one thing that I can repeat, I guess, if you will, and that is it was just a resounding message time and time again from the customer base is that there has not been one customer or potential user has come to us and had their doubts about this technology's place in the industry. Every one of them said this will be
00:19:48
Speaker
a common mainstay technology in our industry over the next few years. There's no question of if this will be applied. It is who's going to buy it first, how far are they going to go with it, and how many are they going to install in the initial orders? Yeah, well, it solves so many common problems that we've talked about. Inefficiencies at the mill, safety concerns for workers, worker shortages. It's just one of those solutions that
00:20:13
Speaker
once you present it, everyone in the room just goes, well, yeah, obviously, obviously we should be doing this.
00:20:19
Speaker
I grew up in rural Saskatchewan, and growing up, I won't say how many years ago, but everybody knew somebody that voted real cars. In fact, at one point in time, going through high school and so on, that was one of the most desirable jobs because typically the grain companies paid a little bit more money than what you would get pumping gas or changing tires at the local service shop, or in my case, throwing bales or whatnot. It was a desirable job.
00:20:47
Speaker
Today's day and age, it's not a desirable job. There's less people that want to do that type of work. And aside from all the safety and risk things around it, it's very physical work and it's in less than ideal environments all the time. And we are shipping more products than we ever have before, those small town elevators.
00:21:07
Speaker
have largely those wood crib elevators have all been replaced by or largely been replaced by concrete or large corrugated steel facilities that are five times the size to ten times the size of what these you know traditional little wood crib elevators used to be. The volumes are shipped are massive and there's no longer a gold-voted rail car then come in and warm up it's like no you're staying on top of that rail car until we're done because this train's got to go.
00:21:34
Speaker
And that creates other challenges. Especially when you're like, oh, by the way, it came in on a Saturday on your weekend too. Sorry, I was supposed to be here Thursday, got here on Saturday. Come on in and work 12 hours. Exactly. I joked with that when I was down in Jeeps in Kansas, I was joking with some guys in the industry that obviously had a little bit of an agricultural background. And I kind of smirked and I said, you know, if people like doing certain jobs, we would have never invented the manure spreader.
00:22:02
Speaker
How about you fill in the blanks? Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially this day and age, I mean, all credit to people that do it now, but it is back breaking card labor to the kind of labor that when you are 50 and 60, you really start feeling it in your bones and your joints. It's a young man's game. Certainly. My dad who, you know, named the company after cause he had had some.
00:22:22
Speaker
He put a lot of years in and loading rail cars back when farming got in trouble and we spent some tough times in some drought conditions and so on in the 80s. He went back to work at the local potash mine and eventually got into loading rail cars. He put it in perspective that on a unit train, over the course of a shift, a 12-hour shift, you could be bending over as many as 1,500 times to basically touch your toes. And when you think that you're bundled up, you're maybe wearing
00:22:50
Speaker
insulated clothing because it's cold and you've got a full rest system on you that acts a lot like a seat belt. Sometimes if you're going over rough roads, it locks up once in a while and it's always kind of gently pulling back at you because you're on a retractable line. Bending over that many times in a shift couldn't be quite something. Not to mention every time you're bending over, you're doing something. You're lifting a weight, you're pushing a lever, you're doing some kind of a manual or mechanical movement with your hands.
00:23:16
Speaker
And if you lace on top of that, you know, you're cold or maybe you're not feeling you're at your best. You've got slips and trips, hazard, you're working at heights, so maybe you're a little bit nervous. And then you do this repeatedly day after day after day, you start to paint a picture of this is a less than ideal experience. And you know, what kind of joke, how maybe our human workforce isn't as tough as it used to be. I'll say one thing, we're smarter than we used to be because we've learned more
00:23:45
Speaker
We've seen the way things, where injuries happen. We see how we can improve things along the way. And we create safer, more progressive work environments. I think that the antiquation of having people on top of real cars is just another one of those steps forward in the industrial world, is that we're going to use the latest of technology and we're going to be able to put people in a better position. And by doing so, we're going to be able to put our operations and our companies in a better position as well.
00:24:11
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Well, for anyone who wants more information, where should they find you? Where should they get more? Well, you know what? We have a tremendous team here, some of which are doing a lot of great work on the marketing front as well. So you can find us on YouTube. Of course, you can find us on our webpage to www.rayhawk.ca and just reach out, just get connected, whether it be LinkedIn,
00:24:34
Speaker
YouTube director website would be more than happy to have a conversation with you to explain a little bit more with technology and increase your level of understanding and make sure to do that and i hope that you guys reach out with any further developments to us a few great we love to talk to you again and hopefully we can make visit one of the facilities that installs one of these things so we can see
00:24:53
Speaker
see it in action, that would be amazing. Yeah, it's exciting technology. Everybody watches for sure. It doesn't matter who it is on the customer's side or even on our side. Every time we watch it work, it's just magical. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. Everyone out there listening, thank you so much for doing that. Until next time, stay safe. I know. Thanks a lot, Steven.