their iron ore operations in
Western Australia.
Australia has been the host
country for most autonomy trials,
including the aforementioned
Rio Tinto/Komatsu collaboration,
but also for Caterpillar and Hitachi.
Caterpillar currently has two fleets
of autonomous trucks running in
Western Australia: a fleet of six
running at Jimblebar with another
six to come online at Wheelarra.
There are plans to expand the
existing fleet and also add additional
fleets at the current sites and
neighboring mines.
In 2013, Hitachi Construction
Machinery (Australia) announced
the initial trials of AHS at the
Meandu coal mine. This
announcement came after Hitachi’s
plans to expand its suite of mining
technologies through its subsidiary,
Wenco. The first of three trucks from
Japan, Hitachi’s new EH5000 AC
trucks, were scheduled to arrive in
Q2 2013. Meandu, run by
Stanwell Corp., had planned to hold
the trials over a three-year period.
Beyond Australia’s iron
ore mines
Outside of Australia, ASI has
installed its retrofit package on two
mining units in South Africa.
Founded in 2000, ASI focused on
agriculture and automotive
industries until 2008, when it
released its first vehicle with
autonomous options into the mining
market. Beyond the vehicles and
equipment used in hard rock and
coal mining, Suncor Oil Sands is
currently running two
autonomous‑capable haul trucks as
part of an engineering test at its
minesite. As of February 2014,
Suncor has one factory Cat 797F with
a factory autonomous package that
runs with the rest of the Suncor
truck fleet but with the autonomous
feature deactivated. This truck
collects data only and will continue
to do so until early 2015. There is
also one Komatsu truck running
autonomously, but separated in its
own area, with a standard Komatsu
test track totalling 2 km.
There are other major OEM
players that do not currently have
autonomous trials or deployments,
but it is in their roadmap. For
example, at the Canadian Institute of
Mining (CIM) AGM in May 2014,
Liebherr Group shared their goal of
implementing an autonomous trial
within the next four to six years.
Liebherr realises that they will need
to expand their mine management
system products, i.e. fleet
management, which could be
achieved either through buying or
partnering with another company.
For starters, they have partnered
with Guardvant on proximity
detection and operator awareness.
As the industry competency with
AHS matures, other aspects of the
mining process will come into play
in terms of integrating these with the
overall autonomous mining vision:
“Although our industry is focused
on the haulage piece of the
autonomous puzzle, mining is an
activity that acts as a system. There
are benefits to be reaped from
automating the digging cycle for
loading haul trucks, especially if
they’re autonomous. Even now there
is a lot of value in automating
certain portions of a shovel’s digging
that will yield productivity gains,”
says Eric Hsieh, product manager of
technology at Joy Global.
Challenges and obstacles
With any new technology, there are
challenges. The following are
obstacles the industry currently faces
that emerged through the OTM/OEM
interviews:
n
n
Proving the technology itself:
this is one of the biggest
hurdles, but will be relatively
straightforward to overcome.
As interest, support, R&D,
testing, adjustments, engineering
and inter/intra‑industry
collaboration expands, the
adoption of autonomy as
a proven technology will
ultimately arrive.
n
n
OEM dependency (single
sourcing all equipment) vs
OEM-agnostic companies:
some
companies feel that buying
all equipment and technology
from one company (i.e.
Caterpillar, Komatsu, Hitachi,
etc.) is a huge value, whereas
other companies feel that it
increases overall risk. When
an entire technology roadmap
and respective purchases are
based on one company, some
buying power and influence
on the technology direction
is ultimately lost. Goddard
believes that: “as customers
become more sophisticated,
they are going to demand
best‑of‑breed integrations
to meet their operational
objectives. Clearly, the trend is
towards further integration of
systems, both onboard and in
the office.” However, there is
an integration risk when one
OEM is used for trucks, one
OTM for fleet management
systems and then another OTM
for the autonomous piece (i.e.
Leica Geosystems, ASI).
n
n
Network support:
one of the
most important supporting
factors of autonomy is deploying,
designing and supporting a
network infrastructure with the
required bandwidth, latency,
coverage and redundancy.
As Scott Beer, COO of Rajant,
notes: “most of the applications
are written as client-server
applications, which require
the mother ship approach. In
which case, if you take out the
mother ship, all the drones
stop working. This approach
requires high bandwidth and
100% availability of the network,
which increases network costs
to get that performance and also
requires that [companies] build
in redundancy.” It has been
surprising that OEM/OTMs do
not have an end-to-end solution
that includes the network piece.
n
n
Capital cost and upgrade path:
cost is one of the major reasons
for developing this technology;
however, it is also one of the
major hurdles. This can be
mitigated with an upgrade path
September 2014
|
World Coal
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