When they presented Hero in Milan, the room wasn’t sure what to expect. A robot on road construction sites? Yes, right there, among orange cones, temporary signs and cars whizzing by a few centimeters from those working. An idea that was born in a difficult context: in the last year 1,090 people died at workAnd 156 they were employed in construction. A number that cannot be read without feeling a lump in the throat. The latest tragedy, in the province of Vicenza, tells the same story once again: a truck that doesn’t brake in time and a worker who doesn’t return home.
And this is where Hero comes in. Not as a superhero, even if the imagery suggests it, but the intent is much more concrete, since it was born as tool to shift risk from flesh to metaland take away from the workers the most dangerous task: installing the construction site while cars pass by like bullets.
Hero is a project by Edil San Felice, developed with Notos Group and Federico II University. Today there is a one meter tall prototype, but the final version will arrive in 1.80 meterswith six hours of battery life and the ability to work on around ten construction sites in the same day. The investment was 600 thousand eurosand the company has already filed the first European patent dedicated to a humanoid for road safety.
How Hero learns and why it can change the lives of those who work on our roads
The most fascinating part is the way Hero learns to move. The engineers didn’t put it out on the street to practice: they built a digital world around it, a kind of realistic video game where the robot makes mistakes, learns, tries again, is corrected, rewarded or “reprimanded” like a stubborn but promising child.
Inside that virtual world he learned to follow road markings, recognize obstacles, control the environment with a 360 degree view and grasp materials with hands that feel pressure and temperature. The result is surprising: when he leaves the factory, Hero walks alone, understands what he has to do, reacts if something goes wrong. You don’t need a remote control, you don’t need a worker to guide it step by step. Its artificial intelligence is not there for show: it has been trained to really work in the field.
The “sentinel” function is the most striking. If Hero senses a car approaching abnormally, it triggers an alarm so loud that it can be heard even over the background noise of a construction site. It is designed to save precious seconds, the ones that can avoid yet another tragedy.
The company is clear: the workers will not lose their jobs. Hero serves to take away the burden of the riskiest tasks from them, not to replace them. The team will in fact have to learn to work together, a bit like when a new, very capable and very particular colleague arrives, with whom you have to find a common rhythm. The potential of technology goes beyond roads. Di Palma imagines similar robots working in buildings, moving loads, in all those situations where the boundary between routine and danger is too thin.
The real obstacle, for now, is not technical but bureaucratic: the Highway Code does not allow a robot to install a construction site. An exemption is needed. The company has already launched an appeal to the Ministry of Infrastructure: if the law does not change, Hero will remain an excellent idea stuck in the pits.
And it would be a shame, because the goal is very simple: to get the workers who work on our roads home safe and sound.
