Wirtgen Group is actively developing automated road construction vehicles as stepping stones for full autonomy using some of the same technology stack as parent company John Deere.
During a recent demonstration of its roadbuilding machinery at the company’s North American headquarters in the US state of Tennessee, company executives outlined the benefits of its specialised heavy machinery for road building.
Demand for roads and infrastructure keeps rising while contractors juggle labour shortages, climbing material costs, tighter project timelines and shorter paving seasons.
In the US alone, the construction industry is expected to need nearly 700,000 additional workers by 2031 just to keep pace with demand.
About 40% of the four million miles of roadways across the US are currently rated in poor or mediocre condition.
“As we talked with our customers, we learned a few things about some of their business challenges, which is simply to do more with less,” said Craig Lamarque, VP and head of digital products at Wirtgen America. “Every day our customers are responsible to ensure the safety of every person on absolutely every job site”.
“And they have to do that with increasingly less skilled and less experienced personnel.”
Lamarque explained customers must complete a greater number of projects on tighter timelines to stay profitable while coping with issues with materials, sustainability pressures, labour shortages, and the need to stay on budget and on schedule.
Wirtgen Group responded by introducing digital tools to help address those challenges.
He said Wirtgen’s digital strategy centres on three pillars: connected support to maximize uptime, job site intelligence to expose inefficiencies and improve decision-making, and smart automation to boost machine performance.
Those capabilities are embedded across its road construction equipment lineup and are supported by hardware and software in collaboration with John Deere.
A legacy built on family names
The Wirtgen Group was a privately held German company before it was acquired by John Deere in 2017.
Earlier in its history, the Wirtgen Group bought asphalt paving company Vogele (in 1996) ahead of purchasing soil and asphalt compaction company Hamm three years later. Vogele was established in 1836, one year prior to John Deere.
Kleemann was acquired in 2006, which expanded Wirtgen’s reach into mineral processing with mobile crushing and screening plants.
The Wirtgen Group bought a 70% stake in Benninghoven in 2014, adding asphalt mixing plants to the ecosystem and enabling Wirtgen to offer the entire cycle of road construction equipment from mixing and paving to milling and recycling.
Wirtgen America was established in 1984 and now includes 300 employees across the Tennessee campus.
“Every one of those names of the brands is a family name, much the same as Deere,” said Wirtgen America president and CEO Jim McEvoy. “From that standpoint, we have a long legacy of being early in these markets, being leaders in these markets and being very innovative in these product spaces.”
Here’s a look at three of the roadbuilding machines and technologies showcased in Tennessee across asphalt milling, paving and compaction.
Wirtgen milling machine
The milling machine removes old asphalt or concrete surfaces while using automation and digital guidance technologies to improve precision, efficiency and performance tracking. It is designed for high-output work on freeways, highways, airports and other major infrastructure projects.
The W210XF is equipped with a 2.5 metre-wide cutter drum which removes asphalt and concrete prior to loading the material into a truck. It uses automation and digital guidance technologies across eight cameras to improve precision, efficiency and machine performance tracking.
“Simple diagnostics, intuitive instructions on the display and backup components built into the machine make it easy to keep going,” Lamarque said.
WPT Milling documents job and machine data for billing and emissions tracking. Smart Level Pro is a fully integrated differential milling system which scans the surface about to be milled.
The process begins with a high-speed survey scan of the existing road surface, either by the customer or a third-party surveyor, without closing the road. The resulting digital model is then georeferenced and logged using GNSS.
After scanning, the road profile is refined to meet specifications, then uploaded to the John Deere Operations Centre and Work Planner, where cutting depths can be checked in advance which saves time compared with milling first and verifying later.
Utilising two John Deere StarFire receivers connected by cellular service, Lamarque said the mill goes to work, “precisely milling the design depth and slope, leaving the best possible surface”.
StarFire GNSS Guidance is Deere’s satellite technology which helps machines maintain highly accurate positioning, alignment and paving guidance throughout the roadbuilding process.
Mill Assist is an automated system on the milling machine that uses real-time machine data to optimise performance, improve efficiency, and reduce fuel consumption and emissions.
Vogele asphalt paver
The asphalt pavers are packed with highly specialised automation, levelling and material handling technologies.
Smart Pave is an advanced digital control and automation system developed by Vogele for its asphalt road pavers. AutoTrac technology helps the paver hold its direction of travel and paving width with precision.
RoadScan is Vogele’s proprietary, non-contact thermal imaging and temperature measurement system mounted directly to the asphalt paver.
Hamm asphalt roller
The double-drum asphalt roller machine compacts fresh asphalt to the target density required for long term durability, using real-time density monitoring and intelligent compaction technology to hit the mark.
It focuses on preventing over-compaction, maximising operator efficiency and providing proof of compaction quality to contractors, state and federal authorities.
The roller uses a combination of vibration and oscillation to compact material to the desired density. Smart Compact Pro and Track Assist help road crews compact more efficiently, cost-effectively and safely while also meeting intelligent compaction specifications.
Intelligent compaction is data collection of the roller using GPS compact mapping, temperature sensors which map and report asphalt surface temperature and an accelerometer sensor that reports stiffness.
From automation to autonomy
Jason Ambroson, VP and managing director of Wirtgen International, explained running the same technologies, connectivity and data sensors across the various roadbuilding machines enables customers to be more productive using fewer employees and fewer resources.
“We are moving from automation to autonomy,” he said.
That trajectory of connecting machines, data and operators into a single intelligent system was what the Tennessee demonstration was ultimately built to show.
The post Feature: Wirtgen Group paves the way for autonomous road building appeared first on Mobile World Live.
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Orange deepened its push into the travel eSIM market through a global distribution deal with online travel agency Trip.com, offering mobile connectivity at the point of travel booking as demand for roaming services grows.
Orange Travel, an Orange Group subsidiary, stated the partnership will enable Trip.com users to buy Orange Travel eSIM packages directly on the agency platform, allowing customers to arrange connectivity before departure, pay in local currency and activate the eSIM upon arrival.
Trip.com customers will be able to buy packages covering France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Switzerland, with the partners aiming to target key European tourist markets. The pair noted the region accounts for more than 50 per cent of global tourist arrivals, led by France and Spain.
The packages on offer include calls, texts and data across 20GB, 50GB and 100GB options, with validity periods of ranging from a week to 30 days. Prices start at €8.99.
Orange Travel highlighted its eSIM services are supported by the Orange Group’s network reach, including connectivity in more than 200 destinations and 700 roaming agreements worldwide.
Orange Travel CEO Frederic Blehaut said the agreement demonstrates its “commitment to accelerating our growth in Asia and internationally through strategic partnerships”, adding the subsidiary offers “European eSIMs with a recognised quality of service backed by the Orange Group’s know-how”.
Chase Liu, general manager of international attractions and tours business at Trip.com Group, added: “With tailor-made offers and packages easily accessible on our platform, our customers can enjoy enhanced connectivity and greater convenience when they travel in this region.”
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AI player Anthropic confidentially submitted paperwork for its proposed initial public listing ahead of rival OpenAI, while also giving the European Union’s cybersecurity body preliminary access to its Mythos AI tool.
The draft registration statement submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission gives the company the option to go public after the agency completes its review.
Anthropic stated the number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set.
News of the IPO move came the same day (1 June) Bloomberg reported Anthropic will give ENISA, the European Union’s cybersecurity agency, access to Mythos through Project Glasswing, an initiative which allows organisations to test Mythos’ capabilities before a wider release.
There are growing concerns among governments over the security implications of Mythos, which Anthropic released to some private companies in April.
Anthropic communicated the decision to the European Commission over the weekend.
EC spokesperson Thomas Regnier confirmed the development to Mobile World Live (MWL) followed several weeks of productive discussions.
“We welcome the latest developments on potential future access,” he said. “This is the result of the Commission’s strong bilateral cooperation and engagement with Anthropic, a leading frontier AI company.”
The EC was careful to frame the moment not as a resolution but as a starting point to work with the US administration, Anthropic and additional AI companies such as OpenAI.
“This is a shared challenge, and we are intensifying our discussions with like-minded partners, including the United States,” Regnier said.
The plan is for ENISA to join Project Glasswing, the coalition Anthropic announced in April which includes Amazon, Apple, AT&T, T-Mobile US, Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike, Nvidia and Palo Alto Networks, among others.
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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon used his keynote at the annual Computex event in Taiwan to stake the company’s claim in the next phase of AI, arguing the technology will reshape demand for compute across devices, networks and data centres.
Amon described 2026 as the “year of the agent”, stating AI is moving from prompt-based interactions to autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning and acting across smartphones, PCs, cars, robots and industrial equipment.
“Agents are not coming in the future. They’re already here,” he said, adding the shift is “changing a lot of the compute” and could generate “a lot of demand for new classes of devices and computing”, creating “one of the largest” upgrade cycles the industry has seen.
Amon said the smartphone will no longer sit alone at the nexus of the digital ecosystem. “Agents become the centre of your digital experience,” he stated, adding devices will increasingly become “endpoints for agents”.
Compute continuum
To this end, the executive laid out Qualcomm’s ambition to support the AI infrastructure transition. Amon pointed to the need for CPUs, GPUs, NPUs and connectivity designed to support AI workloads both on devices and in the cloud, stating the company can help scale AI compute from “sub-2 milliwatts” in devices such as earbuds to kilowatt-level systems in data centres.
He also stressed the engineering challenge around battery life and latency, noting devices must be able to support complex planning, reasoning and coordination. “I cannot emphasise enough the importance of power,” he said.
In addition, Amon framed 6G as a key part of the future AI architecture, noting it is the first wireless generation designed as an AI-native network connecting distributed, hybrid intelligence across devices and data centres.
During the event, the chief also unveiled Dragonfly, Qualcomm’s new data centre brand aimed at inference workloads. He said Qualcomm is already working with hyperscalers and global partners on deployments, adding the fresh brand will allow its portfolio to span “every single tier of the compute continuum”.
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