Caterpillar, the international maker of heavy machinery and eqipment, is seeking to enable it's bulldozers and eather movers to operate autonomously. Using a system of sensors and GPS navigation, the equipment would navigate around a building site while being cooridnated from a remote central location.

"Ten or 15 years down the road," [Mark Pflederer] says, "it's not too much of a stretch to think that we could run multiple bulldozers, wheel loaders or trucks on a site and move the operators to a remote location."

To do this, the company (stock ticker, CAT ), is funding its R&D division with massive amounts of money - $1.3 Billion USD this year. That is almost twice as much as the company has been spending in past years, that is also 2 to 4 times more than any of its competitors.

Among the other benefits of this spending spree, are a complete virtual design lab where equipment can be designed and engineers can see "how every single component of the machine interacts with every other component in the machine as it's moving", along with development on the World's First hydrogen fuel cell for mining equipment. Ultimately, though, CAT is shooting for autonomous operation.

"The easy mines have all been found and exploited," … "so we really are going to start pushing the boundaries in terms of weather and geology and environment. And in a place like Siberia, would people rather be sitting indoors, somewhere warm, remote-controlling, or operating machines out there in the cold?"

And for all you up-and-coming Engineers, CAT is hiring.