At CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2026 in Las Vegas earlier this month, Hitachi Construction Machinery announced a partnership with Palo Alto, CA-based startup Teleo to provide the heavy equipment world with a workforce shortage solution. The partners demonstrated supervised autonomy as a single operator remotely controlled a Hitachi ZW310 wheel loader and an articulated dump truck 500 mi (805 km) away.

The partnership has roots in the 2024 Hitachi Construction Machinery Challenge, for which 127 startups from around the world submitted proposals to a panel of judges. Teleo was one of the winners.

Its supervised autonomy solution allows operators to control multiple machines simultaneously from a remote office-like environment. The innovation is brand-agnostic and presents a viable solution to the work shortages that continue to burden the industry.

Teleo’s turnkey pathway to autonomy for the retrofit of virtually any existing fleet—across models, brands, and vintages—is intended to unlock autonomous operation without replacing equipment. By blending advanced autonomy with real-time teleoperation, its brand of supervised autonomy is engineered to keep operators in command, delivering safety, flexibility, and performance even in the most challenging job-site conditions. Operators can instantly switch from one machine to another, enabling them to control an entire retrofitted fleet from one place.

For Hitachi Construction Machinery America’s Stories from Across the Land video series, Teleo gave customers a first-hand experience with the supervised autonomy technology.

“I was blown away by how easy it is to learn, especially for me personally, not being an operator,” said Pedro Bobadilla, Fleet Manager from Park West, a commercial landscape construction company. “It’s really hard to find qualified operators for all the different types of machines we have. To have someone operate two or three, or even more machines… could reduce our costs significantly.”

This partnership is a part of Hitachi Construction Machinery’s upcoming brand change to LANDCROS. The “O” in the acronym represents “Open,” the company’s commitment to openly collaborating with startups and companies that are experts in emerging technology.

Teleo’s end-to end solution for turning existing equipment, including mixed fleets, into supervised autonomous machines involves hardware and software components that are built in-house by engineers with decades of experience. It includes three main elements.

With its ruggedized Universal Retrofit, one operator can run multiple machines at the same time, switching between them instantaneously. The company provides a robust mesh network that ensures uninterrupted connectivity across dynamic work sites and offers mobile solar stations to power the mesh network anywhere on a site. Whether on-site or long distance, the remote command center enables the operator to supervise equipment from the comfort of an office and offers a 360° field of view around the machine.

The benefits of its technology have been noticed outside the construction industry. The week after CONEXPO/CON-AGG, marine- and military-focused autonomy company Havoc announced that it had acquired Teleo, along with Long Beach, CA-based drone technology company Mavrik, expanding into the land and air domains, reinforcing its efforts in collaborative autonomy, and accelerating its mission to deliver all-domain autonomous systems.

By bringing aerial, ground, and maritime platforms under a single operational architecture and enabling them to collaborate in real time, Havoc is directly addressing growing demand for unified, all-domain autonomy.

“These acquisitions were driven by listening to our customers,” said Paul Lwin, Co-founder and CEO of Havoc. “Across global military markets, we consistently hear the need for a single, unified system to command autonomous assets in every domain, and for those systems to operate together as a coordinated force rather than isolated platforms.”

Teleo’s scalable supervision architecture has direct applicability to defense logistics, convoy operations, and forward operating environments where distributed ground autonomy is mission-critical.

“By combining Teleo’s proven land-domain platform with Havoc’s collaborative autonomy architecture, we can extend fleet-scale supervision across sea, air, and land, accelerating deployment of real-world autonomous systems across both commercial and national security markets,” said Vinay Shet, Co-founder and CEO of Teleo.

Integrated into HavocOS and Havoc Control, the Mavrik and Teleo products are intended to extend Havoc’s proven scalable supervision model, enabling a single operator to oversee multiple autonomous assets, from the maritime domain into the air and on the ground.