On Tuesday, Sudbury MP Viviane Lapointe announced $150,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, funds that support Cambrian College’s collaboration with RufDiamond on their new addition to the amphibious fat truck. For the past two years, students have been learning on a fat truck, an all-terrain vehicle that can travel on otherwise impassable terrain. Students have been developing a mechanized cargo platform to make rough terrain drop-offs easier. “We have the platform here (that) allows the fat truck, which is a highly capable vehicle, to get from A to B,” said Daryl Adams, RufDiamond president. “But once it gets to B, you have to offload heavy equipment.” Patrick Galipeau-Belair, mechanical and advanced vehicle systems engineer at Cambrian, said the work began as a “sticky note” from Adams two years ago. “This funding is to announce a second phase of this, which is refining the prototype,” Galipeau-Belair said. “Obviously, when we’re testing it, we’re finding flaws with it or things we could improve on. So now we’re going to work on doing the second generation of this prototype so that it’s ready for commercialization.” While the group demonstrated how the cargo platform works, they still have some adjustments to make. “We want to increase it by as much weight as we can, whatever the fat truck will allow us to put on it,” Adams said. “To do that, we have to make it more lightweight … Another part of the next phase of this project is to have it so it could level itself in uneven terrain and automatically lower itself to the ground while keeping the cargo level right.” He said the fat truck is a deployable asset and, as of Tuesday evening, was being prepared for wildland firefighting efforts. Delivery or rescue operations “We look at sometimes when it’s too smoky for the helicopters to fly in or fly out in a situation where they have to get firefighters out of a dangerous situation,” Adams said. “The fat truck supplements that overall main effort, where we can go in with a lot of people, but we can also bring supplies and consumables that they would need at a certain spot on the ground. And if required, the fat truck can be an emergency evacuation vehicle. Because it’s amphibious.” The $150,000 will be used to make the equipment more lightweight and efficient, and for their Arctic version of the fat truck design that includes toboggan-like features. Ashley Sheffield, a third-year mechanical engineering student who worked on the project, said seeing the results of their work is rewarding. “When you see it at the very end, you almost forget all the struggles you put into it and just are so proud of what came out of it,” Sheffield said. “We’ve talked a lot about dual-use technology,” Lapointe said. “Today was a perfect example of what that is. And a very tangible example of how that can work here in Sudbury.”
