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Giant Robotic Mining Trucks in the Australian Desert

119 points by friism 13y ago

tocomment 13y ago
Does medium use a proof reader? They confused "is" and "are" a couple of times in that article.
- billybob255 13y ago
  Medium is just a blogging platform
- prezjordan 13y ago
  Articles labeled "Editor's Picks" are copyedited and fact-checked. Everything else is just like posts on your own blog.
riggins 13y ago
goodbye truck driving jobs.
- oh_sigh 13y ago
  Hello modern day luddite!
- naterator 13y ago
  I wonder what the social implication will be when, over the next 20 years, whole sectors are automated. There are so many simple jobs that are /ripe/ for automation. If you're not doing the automation or some other high skill job, you're in serious trouble. Social welfare, and free money to the unemployed, are going to become an obligate, long-term realities.
  - cinquemb 13y ago
    > Social welfare, and free money to the unemployed, are going to become an obligate, long-term realities Something tells me from watching what is going on in places like greece, spain, and even stateside in places like detroit and camden, that the above is not going to happen. Or should people expect central banks to print more and allocate more debt to people?
    - iaskwhy 13y ago
      That might be because governments keep talking about going back to growth after the austerity measures. If there is no growth and unemployment stays at the current levels, things eventually need to change. And it's not only a governments' thing, with a large part of the population without any money, consumption will suffer a lot so companies will feel it deeply. It's going to take some time though as nowadays the middle class doesn't like the idea of more social welfare since there's currently a direct connection to heavier taxes.
      - sbarre 13y ago
        I realize this is slightly off-topic, but reducing consumption is not a bad thing. We can all collectively live on a lot less than we currently do (stuff-wise, not necessarily money-wise). I keep hoping that a positive side effect of this economic shift will the reduction of accumulation of unessential crap..
        iaskwhy 13y ago
        I tend to agree but if the consequence is less money for the companies to hire people then extending social welfare needs to cover for the lack of jobs available. I can imagine a lot of positive side effects if this happens.
        el_zorro 13y ago
        I think that the fruits of all these contemporary advancements won't be really seen until the global population starts dropping. Right now, automating generally puts someone out of a job and forces them into one that is more or less made up just so that they can have a job[1]. With a declining population, automation will pick up whatever slack worker 'scarcity' creates. It's interesting to think about how that world would look like. Imagining a constant rate of production, this means that cheaper goods will be spread around fewer people. I imagine that this would drive a push away from mid-level jobs, probably into highly educated roles that innovate or maintain complex autonomous systems. [1] http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
  - riledhel 13y ago
    Once again, we'll have large amounts of people in need of re education to learn new abilities for jobs that might not exist today. It's interesting as well what automation might do to economies with large work forces supported by governments.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    I'm just waiting for the time when society realize working may not be an existential need. http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/buckminster-fuller-earn-living-technological-breakthrough.jpg http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/buckminster-...
- krasin 13y ago
  hello truck repairing jobs
  - Diederich 13y ago
    I suspect this kind of automation will end up reducing the total number of trucks required, perhaps by quite a lot.
    - another-one-off 13y ago
      No, not by very much. Computerised dispatching systems tell trucks where to go, even with human operators, and a human is probably a little better at driving than an automated truck. The gain is that the trucks no longer park for any reason other than maintenance, while humans have to stop to embark/disembark. And will frequently have, eg, a fatigue break during night shift. If anything, supply/demand curve logic suggests there would be more trucks overall.
      - jfoutz 13y ago
        As you say, existing trucks are parked a bunch of hours a day. I think you and the parent have a semantic misunderstanding. You (i think) are saying there will be more trucks on the road, more routes being run at the same time. Th parent is saying fewer trucks will be built, because we can get 100% utilization as opposed to the 33% we have now. [1] [1] disclaimer: i don't think robot trucks will have 100% utilization, and current utilization is probably higher than 1/3, i just guessed 8 hours of use a day. I think the point stands, more trucks on the road at the same time, but fewer trucks overall.
        another-one-off 13y ago
        I understand what the parent is saying, I just disagree :). My day job has large elements of mining haul truck performance. Currently most mines would probably be in the 40-70% utilisation band (for practical purposes), automating the trucks would probably add ... 5% utilisation? Maybe 10%? Both guesses, but they aren't likely to break 75% (I doubt they would break 65%, but I'm wiling to be surprised by evidence). Practically speaking, the trucks would be more reliable due to automating, and in economic terms, truck hours/dollar would increase (*edit, said drop initially). Supply/demand theory tells us that mining companies could reasonably respond by buying more trucks. I am referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- beedogs 13y ago
  Would be nice if the mining superprofits tax had gone through. Then at least we could be collecting some revenue from these vultures before they pick up shop and leave the place a completely uninhabitable toxic mess in 10 years' time.
siculars 13y ago
> The company also claims it can be more productive with the trucks — it’s more expensive to hire drivers and handle the logistics of moving them back and forth from the iron mines. Followed by: >But the reason why the technology is picking up in the mines is partly out of necessity. Partly because Rio Tinto can afford it. Let's face it. Anything to not pay pensions and workman's comp.
- krasin 13y ago
  Pensions should be paid by the government, not private companies. In this case, everything is clear: companies are trying to be as efficient, as possible (for example, by reducing labor costs), pay taxes which will be distributed by the government for the social purposes (pensions).
  - robbiep 13y ago
    Australia's employer-funded pension system has meant that we have around 1.5 Trillion in fully funded retirement funds which have decreased infrastructure funding costs locally and are invested internationally making Australia's superannuation sector a major player in international investments. The government can't be counted on to fully fund retirement benefits without pillaging the pile of cash, as the example in most American states shows. It's a brilliant idea and has been extremely successful.
- beambot 13y ago
  They can afford it because they have sufficient cash reserves to pay the upfront costs of robotic vehicles versus ongoing personnel costs. Eliminating workman's comp suggests that the robotic vehicles are substantially safer compared to putting human lives at risk. (As a roboticist, I reject the notion that "all automation is bad", but that's a separate discussion.)
- another-one-off 13y ago
  Hey. I'm an Australian Mining Engineer, (co-incidentally employed by Rio Tinto, although obviously I'm no spokesperson and have no idea what the higher-ups are doing, or even blokes on other sites). While I don't have any knowledge of the autonomous truck project, pensions & workman's comp have basically nothing to do with it. The mining industry in Australia is on the tail end of the biggest expansion in living memory, and it turns out it is near-impossible for love or money to move Australians out into the desert to work in mines. It was not unreasonable to have trucks parked up because there simply was no human to drive them, and the salaries for a truck driver were in the $150,000+ Australian dollars, plus food, lodging and plane flights. This doesn't represent a scary cost for a mining company - it represents a scary lack of worker supply. A parked truck is an unhappy truck. In addition, we have very strict OH&S laws and the site mangers can be raked over the coals for the wierdest things. Eg, if I saw a light vehicle parked on non-level ground without wheel chocks, it would probably be escalated to the site Manager (not a pit supevisor, not the Manager of Mining, but the person responsible for the entire site) and someone being sacked would be an option on the table. Getting rid of the humans is a huge benefit from a safety perspective, which we take very, very seriously. Finally, automated trucks will provably do the right thing, all the time, without getting fatigued or taking breaks. Humans just cannot compete from a utilising-the-very-expensive-asset-properly point of view.
suprjami 13y ago
I have two friends who work on this for Rio and the level of tech is amazing. Even the manned trucks have their routes all planned by computer. Some algorithm decides the most efficient way to move trucks around. Sometimes a driver will get a seemingly nonsensical instruction to deposit his load in a location other than the one closest to him, but when you query the computer about it, it's got a valid reason why that's a better idea for efficiency and it's always right. The precision in the GPS trackers in phenomenal. Short range scanners pick up GPS tags on all corners of a bin, a robotic delivery system can place a gigantic item with mere centimetres of accuracy. The human really is the weakest link in the entire system. It's unsurprising the military want this. I remember being an outside contractor for PermoDrive in the early 2000s. They were just a small company from a small rural Australian town who developed a system which enabled trucks to store braking energy and later use it as forward momentum, reducing fuel costs by some large amount. Once they had a working prototype, the US military swooped in and bought the company.
- lacero 13y ago
  This reminds me of programming the lego nxt robot to move foam blocks for a college robotics class. Amazing what algorithms can do with the right hardware!
- femto 13y ago
  It's possibly not GPS achieving the centimetre accuracy, but a localised system, such as locata [1]. [1] http://locata.com/ http://locata.com/
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I think they use local calibration. You have a GPS receiver at a known, surveyed point onsite. You compare the GPS placement to the actual location of the receiver, then use that difference for calculations being performed on other receivers.
  - zeckalpha 13y ago
    The military could be achieving that accuracy, though.
Game_Ender 13y ago
Both the autonomous mining trucks [1] and the automated military convoy run on software developed by NREC [2] (a part of the Robotics Institute at CMU), and I have worked on both. It's a very cool place to work and we are hiring. If you have any questions about what it's like to work on these kind of systems ask away. 1 - http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ahs/ http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ahs/ 2 - http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/cargo/ http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/cargo/
- omtaly 13y ago
  Ah, I would love to work on such projects. What is a real barrier for me that most of these jobs require US citizenship or permanent residency, which I don't have the luck to show. I do understand that these are strict requirements because of the export control laws. Since you are in the industry you might know if there is any place where you can work on autonomous vehicles without being a US citizen. Maybe somewhere where they work on civilian applications? Or a comparable lab/company in europe?
  - Game_Ender 13y ago
    One of the advantages of an academic institution like CMU (which NREC is part of) is that they actually have a good deal of commercial work which doesn't require US citizenship. For example the robotic mining project is shown here is not export controlled, and neither are the agricultural projects [1]. 1 - http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/usda/ http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/usda/
- Qworg 13y ago
  As someone who also worked on AHS, did Komatsu join in, or is it still just CAT?
  - Game_Ender 13y ago
    So it looks like Rio Tinto is using Komatsu's system and BHP Billiton is using Caterpillar's. To my knowledge NREC only works on Caterpillar's system, it's just a coincidence the systems have the same name.
ballard 13y ago
When I was at a GPS shop in '99, the back lot already had Case and Cat farm and mining equipment in fully-autonomous mode. The challenge being worked on at the time was handling traffic between vehicles. The other one was that having non-controlled human vehicles with transponders would be way more complicated. It's simpler to just have all automated or nothing.
lifeformed 13y ago
I don't get it - is the unit cost per driving system cheaper than the cost of one human driver? Surely in a huge operation like that, the costs of operating a giant multimillion dollar vehicle could also include the salary of a driver?
- another-one-off 13y ago
  The salary of the driver is mostly inconsequential - in Western Australia, they have trouble getting people out there for any price. So autonomous trucks are good because they solve the risk and delay associated with finding an operator. Autonomous trucks will get to the stage where they simply don't stop. Human operated trucks need breaks, and make mistakes. So it doesn't matter if they cost more - they also produce more. Finally, autonomous trucks don't cause OH&S incidents nearly as easily. This is a huge issue, especially for a company like Rio Tinto. In Australia at least, OH&S issues can shut mines down. This alone would probably be worth any price premium in the million dollar order of magnitude.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Seriously cool stuff. I continue to wonder why there isn't more earth bound investigation into fully automating mining, it seems that we would have to have something like that if we want to mine an asteroid.
eidosabi 13y ago
I work for a company in Utah that makes kits to convert single-person driven vehicles (e.g., cars, trucks, motorboats) into autonomous vehicles (http://kairosautonomi.com/ http://kairosautonomi.com/). One of our projects this last year was with a mining company in Russia (http://www.belaz-mining.com/eng/belaz/30t.html http://www.belaz-mining.com/eng/belaz/30t.html / Russian video of our trucks http://auto.tut.by/news/autobusiness/346004.html http://auto.tut.by/news/autobusiness/346004.html). At least one of their mining areas is highly irradiated. The radiation is so high that drivers reach their life-time radiation limit in about 6 months of driving. So they're automating their fleet of trucks to avoid the need to constantly replace drivers.
xanth 13y ago
I think this article should be called why Avatar doesn't work.
- another-one-off 13y ago
  Avatar the 2009 movie? A real mining company would have gone through local government and just have set up an underground mine, and tunneled under the tree-thing. Maybe done a study or two to assess the impact of mining tree roots. A project that big would go through quite some effort to appease the locals - otherwise the mine (basically inevitably) gets written off.
larsonf 13y ago
Does anyone have any insight into the underlying architecture of these large-scale projects? Like programming languages, project structure, how many software people involved? I imagine it's something along the lines of CERN or NASA projects in terms of size, although perhaps not complexity.
jacques_chester 13y ago
My Dad worked on this tangentially for a while, helping set up and maintaining the communications systems. Rio is also automating their trains, and minesite operations (a kind of "flight tower" for a minesite) have all been done remote for years. It looks a lot like an NOC, actually. Finding people to drive trucks for 100k+ is actually not that hard. You basically advertise a job: "drive trucks. Make big bucks" and people flock to it. But getting 2 or 3 different people to drive the same truck in shifts, and accommodating them, and flying them in and out, and feeding them ... it adds up. To an overhead that could run past a million dollars per year, per truck. And if you have an idle truck, that's lost money. But it's not even the money. Rio, like BHP Billiton, enjoys insane free cashflow right now. It's about protecting production from union activity. In the 80s the Western Australian mining industry was repeatedly crippled by huge fights between the mining giants and the unions, particularly the quite-militant CFMEU. A mix of legislative changes by a long-serving conservative government beginning in the mid 90s, plus generous individual contracts, broke the unions' grip on mining. And just in time for the mining boom. In 2007 a Labor government was elected and dramatically tilted the legislative tables back in favour of the unions. Then the GFC struck with full force and it so happened that Rio had just prior to it borrowed heavily to buy assets at the top of the market. So any prolonged interruption to production would be death. And so Rio have moved to make their mining operations as union-proof as possible. Automatic trucks is part of it. The ore trains too, parts of their port systems ... everything that can be made autonomous and/or remote is being made autonomous and remote.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Driving the trucks in a sane way and not flipping them over while turning is actually so boring that it is hard to find people who can and will do it and still get good productivity, at any pay rate. Source: Brother in law was a foreman at a strip mine.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I asked my old man about taking up truck driving. He said that I'd go insane with boredom.
- 13y ago
ck2 13y ago
When war becomes unmanned for the attackers, this world is going to become an incredibly terrifying place. Can you imagine the warmongers when there is little human cost and all you have to do is cut funding education or assistance to the poor to attack another nation? I really hope we get mandatory draft in the USA before this decade is out, it's the only way to stop the madness. If it becomes delegated to people sitting in trailers flying armed drones being yelled at to fire upon possibly innocent civilians, we are doomed.
- Joeri 13y ago
  It's already too late. The US military trains more drone pilots than fighter pilots. The undeclared drone war in pakistan has killed over 2000 so far. The future has come and gone.
  - wepple 13y ago
    > The US military trains more drone pilots than fighter pilots. Was going to ask for a source - found several... back in 2009!
- SimHacker 13y ago
  The United States of America is under attack from the Republican Party.
fsiefken 13y ago
Am I the only one being reminded of the Dune spice harvester or sandcrawlers? "A large (often 120 meters by 40 meters) spice mining machine commonly employed on rich, uncontaminated melange blows (often called a "Crawler" because of a bug-like body on independent tracks)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_ships Harvester paper model (by 'The 4ce') http://papermau.blogspot.nl/2011/11/dunes-spice-harvester-paper-model-by.html http://papermau.blogspot.nl/2011/11/dunes-spice-harvester-pa... "Spice harvesters are large vehicles specialy designed to harvest the Spice Melange. Because of the rythmic sound they make, they are regularly eaten by Sandworms. When Muad' Dib asked Liet Kynes if they would see a sandworm while veiwing the spice harvesting, Kynes replied that they always come when they hear a spice harvester." http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spice_harvesters http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spice_harvesters Dune2 images: https://www.google.com/search?q=spice+harvester+dune2&num=100&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=spice+harvester+dune2&num=10...
jpalomaki 13y ago
Sandvik is developing technology[1] that also changes the underground operations to automated and/or remotely controlled. Underground navigation technology comes from Navitec Systems [2]. I think they are using laser scanning to provide accurate positioning underground without requiring installation of beacons or cables. Accurate positioning is obviously important since it affects how fast the underground trucks can drive. [1] http://bit.ly/17dDq99 http://bit.ly/17dDq99 [2] http://www.navitecsystems.com/wordpress/en/referenssit/sandviks-automine/ http://www.navitecsystems.com/wordpress/en/referenssit/sandv...
hhandoko 13y ago
Some more info if anyone's interested: http://m2m.riotinto.com/issue/1/article/let-ballet-begin http://m2m.riotinto.com/issue/1/article/let-ballet-begin
TausAmmer 13y ago
This is cool and all, now how can we use this to kill people?

119 points by friism 13y ago

tocomment 13y ago

Does medium use a proof reader? They confused "is" and "are" a couple of times in that article.

billybob255 13y ago
Medium is just a blogging platform
prezjordan 13y ago
Articles labeled "Editor's Picks" are copyedited and fact-checked. Everything else is just like posts on your own blog.

riggins 13y ago

goodbye truck driving jobs.

oh_sigh 13y ago
Hello modern day luddite!
naterator 13y ago
I wonder what the social implication will be when, over the next 20 years, whole sectors are automated. There are so many simple jobs that are /ripe/ for automation. If you're not doing the automation or some other high skill job, you're in serious trouble. Social welfare, and free money to the unemployed, are going to become an obligate, long-term realities.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  > Social welfare, and free money to the unemployed, are going to become an obligate, long-term realities Something tells me from watching what is going on in places like greece, spain, and even stateside in places like detroit and camden, that the above is not going to happen. Or should people expect central banks to print more and allocate more debt to people?
  - iaskwhy 13y ago
    That might be because governments keep talking about going back to growth after the austerity measures. If there is no growth and unemployment stays at the current levels, things eventually need to change. And it's not only a governments' thing, with a large part of the population without any money, consumption will suffer a lot so companies will feel it deeply. It's going to take some time though as nowadays the middle class doesn't like the idea of more social welfare since there's currently a direct connection to heavier taxes.
    - sbarre 13y ago
      I realize this is slightly off-topic, but reducing consumption is not a bad thing. We can all collectively live on a lot less than we currently do (stuff-wise, not necessarily money-wise). I keep hoping that a positive side effect of this economic shift will the reduction of accumulation of unessential crap..
      - iaskwhy 13y ago
        I tend to agree but if the consequence is less money for the companies to hire people then extending social welfare needs to cover for the lack of jobs available. I can imagine a lot of positive side effects if this happens.
      - el_zorro 13y ago
        I think that the fruits of all these contemporary advancements won't be really seen until the global population starts dropping. Right now, automating generally puts someone out of a job and forces them into one that is more or less made up just so that they can have a job[1]. With a declining population, automation will pick up whatever slack worker 'scarcity' creates. It's interesting to think about how that world would look like. Imagining a constant rate of production, this means that cheaper goods will be spread around fewer people. I imagine that this would drive a push away from mid-level jobs, probably into highly educated roles that innovate or maintain complex autonomous systems. [1] http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
- riledhel 13y ago
  Once again, we'll have large amounts of people in need of re education to learn new abilities for jobs that might not exist today. It's interesting as well what automation might do to economies with large work forces supported by governments.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  I'm just waiting for the time when society realize working may not be an existential need. http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/buckminster-fuller-earn-living-technological-breakthrough.jpg http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/buckminster-...
krasin 13y ago
hello truck repairing jobs
- Diederich 13y ago
  I suspect this kind of automation will end up reducing the total number of trucks required, perhaps by quite a lot.
  - another-one-off 13y ago
    No, not by very much. Computerised dispatching systems tell trucks where to go, even with human operators, and a human is probably a little better at driving than an automated truck. The gain is that the trucks no longer park for any reason other than maintenance, while humans have to stop to embark/disembark. And will frequently have, eg, a fatigue break during night shift. If anything, supply/demand curve logic suggests there would be more trucks overall.
    - jfoutz 13y ago
      As you say, existing trucks are parked a bunch of hours a day. I think you and the parent have a semantic misunderstanding. You (i think) are saying there will be more trucks on the road, more routes being run at the same time. Th parent is saying fewer trucks will be built, because we can get 100% utilization as opposed to the 33% we have now. [1] [1] disclaimer: i don't think robot trucks will have 100% utilization, and current utilization is probably higher than 1/3, i just guessed 8 hours of use a day. I think the point stands, more trucks on the road at the same time, but fewer trucks overall.
      - another-one-off 13y ago
        I understand what the parent is saying, I just disagree :). My day job has large elements of mining haul truck performance. Currently most mines would probably be in the 40-70% utilisation band (for practical purposes), automating the trucks would probably add ... 5% utilisation? Maybe 10%? Both guesses, but they aren't likely to break 75% (I doubt they would break 65%, but I'm wiling to be surprised by evidence). Practically speaking, the trucks would be more reliable due to automating, and in economic terms, truck hours/dollar would increase (*edit, said drop initially). Supply/demand theory tells us that mining companies could reasonably respond by buying more trucks. I am referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
beedogs 13y ago
Would be nice if the mining superprofits tax had gone through. Then at least we could be collecting some revenue from these vultures before they pick up shop and leave the place a completely uninhabitable toxic mess in 10 years' time.

siculars 13y ago

> The company also claims it can be more productive with the trucks — it’s more expensive to hire drivers and handle the logistics of moving them back and forth from the iron mines. Followed by: >But the reason why the technology is picking up in the mines is partly out of necessity. Partly because Rio Tinto can afford it. Let's face it. Anything to not pay pensions and workman's comp.

krasin 13y ago
Pensions should be paid by the government, not private companies. In this case, everything is clear: companies are trying to be as efficient, as possible (for example, by reducing labor costs), pay taxes which will be distributed by the government for the social purposes (pensions).
- robbiep 13y ago
  Australia's employer-funded pension system has meant that we have around 1.5 Trillion in fully funded retirement funds which have decreased infrastructure funding costs locally and are invested internationally making Australia's superannuation sector a major player in international investments. The government can't be counted on to fully fund retirement benefits without pillaging the pile of cash, as the example in most American states shows. It's a brilliant idea and has been extremely successful.
beambot 13y ago
They can afford it because they have sufficient cash reserves to pay the upfront costs of robotic vehicles versus ongoing personnel costs. Eliminating workman's comp suggests that the robotic vehicles are substantially safer compared to putting human lives at risk. (As a roboticist, I reject the notion that "all automation is bad", but that's a separate discussion.)
another-one-off 13y ago
Hey. I'm an Australian Mining Engineer, (co-incidentally employed by Rio Tinto, although obviously I'm no spokesperson and have no idea what the higher-ups are doing, or even blokes on other sites). While I don't have any knowledge of the autonomous truck project, pensions & workman's comp have basically nothing to do with it. The mining industry in Australia is on the tail end of the biggest expansion in living memory, and it turns out it is near-impossible for love or money to move Australians out into the desert to work in mines. It was not unreasonable to have trucks parked up because there simply was no human to drive them, and the salaries for a truck driver were in the $150,000+ Australian dollars, plus food, lodging and plane flights. This doesn't represent a scary cost for a mining company - it represents a scary lack of worker supply. A parked truck is an unhappy truck. In addition, we have very strict OH&S laws and the site mangers can be raked over the coals for the wierdest things. Eg, if I saw a light vehicle parked on non-level ground without wheel chocks, it would probably be escalated to the site Manager (not a pit supevisor, not the Manager of Mining, but the person responsible for the entire site) and someone being sacked would be an option on the table. Getting rid of the humans is a huge benefit from a safety perspective, which we take very, very seriously. Finally, automated trucks will provably do the right thing, all the time, without getting fatigued or taking breaks. Humans just cannot compete from a utilising-the-very-expensive-asset-properly point of view.

suprjami 13y ago

I have two friends who work on this for Rio and the level of tech is amazing. Even the manned trucks have their routes all planned by computer. Some algorithm decides the most efficient way to move trucks around. Sometimes a driver will get a seemingly nonsensical instruction to deposit his load in a location other than the one closest to him, but when you query the computer about it, it's got a valid reason why that's a better idea for efficiency and it's always right. The precision in the GPS trackers in phenomenal. Short range scanners pick up GPS tags on all corners of a bin, a robotic delivery system can place a gigantic item with mere centimetres of accuracy. The human really is the weakest link in the entire system. It's unsurprising the military want this. I remember being an outside contractor for PermoDrive in the early 2000s. They were just a small company from a small rural Australian town who developed a system which enabled trucks to store braking energy and later use it as forward momentum, reducing fuel costs by some large amount. Once they had a working prototype, the US military swooped in and bought the company.

lacero 13y ago
This reminds me of programming the lego nxt robot to move foam blocks for a college robotics class. Amazing what algorithms can do with the right hardware!
femto 13y ago
It's possibly not GPS achieving the centimetre accuracy, but a localised system, such as locata [1]. [1] http://locata.com/ http://locata.com/
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I think they use local calibration. You have a GPS receiver at a known, surveyed point onsite. You compare the GPS placement to the actual location of the receiver, then use that difference for calculations being performed on other receivers.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  The military could be achieving that accuracy, though.

Game_Ender 13y ago

Both the autonomous mining trucks [1] and the automated military convoy run on software developed by NREC [2] (a part of the Robotics Institute at CMU), and I have worked on both. It's a very cool place to work and we are hiring. If you have any questions about what it's like to work on these kind of systems ask away. 1 - http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ahs/ http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ahs/ 2 - http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/cargo/ http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/cargo/

omtaly 13y ago
Ah, I would love to work on such projects. What is a real barrier for me that most of these jobs require US citizenship or permanent residency, which I don't have the luck to show. I do understand that these are strict requirements because of the export control laws. Since you are in the industry you might know if there is any place where you can work on autonomous vehicles without being a US citizen. Maybe somewhere where they work on civilian applications? Or a comparable lab/company in europe?
- Game_Ender 13y ago
  One of the advantages of an academic institution like CMU (which NREC is part of) is that they actually have a good deal of commercial work which doesn't require US citizenship. For example the robotic mining project is shown here is not export controlled, and neither are the agricultural projects [1]. 1 - http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/usda/ http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/usda/
Qworg 13y ago
As someone who also worked on AHS, did Komatsu join in, or is it still just CAT?
- Game_Ender 13y ago
  So it looks like Rio Tinto is using Komatsu's system and BHP Billiton is using Caterpillar's. To my knowledge NREC only works on Caterpillar's system, it's just a coincidence the systems have the same name.

ballard 13y ago

When I was at a GPS shop in '99, the back lot already had Case and Cat farm and mining equipment in fully-autonomous mode. The challenge being worked on at the time was handling traffic between vehicles. The other one was that having non-controlled human vehicles with transponders would be way more complicated. It's simpler to just have all automated or nothing.

lifeformed 13y ago

I don't get it - is the unit cost per driving system cheaper than the cost of one human driver? Surely in a huge operation like that, the costs of operating a giant multimillion dollar vehicle could also include the salary of a driver?

another-one-off 13y ago
The salary of the driver is mostly inconsequential - in Western Australia, they have trouble getting people out there for any price. So autonomous trucks are good because they solve the risk and delay associated with finding an operator. Autonomous trucks will get to the stage where they simply don't stop. Human operated trucks need breaks, and make mistakes. So it doesn't matter if they cost more - they also produce more. Finally, autonomous trucks don't cause OH&S incidents nearly as easily. This is a huge issue, especially for a company like Rio Tinto. In Australia at least, OH&S issues can shut mines down. This alone would probably be worth any price premium in the million dollar order of magnitude.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Seriously cool stuff. I continue to wonder why there isn't more earth bound investigation into fully automating mining, it seems that we would have to have something like that if we want to mine an asteroid.

eidosabi 13y ago

I work for a company in Utah that makes kits to convert single-person driven vehicles (e.g., cars, trucks, motorboats) into autonomous vehicles (http://kairosautonomi.com/ http://kairosautonomi.com/). One of our projects this last year was with a mining company in Russia (http://www.belaz-mining.com/eng/belaz/30t.html http://www.belaz-mining.com/eng/belaz/30t.html / Russian video of our trucks http://auto.tut.by/news/autobusiness/346004.html http://auto.tut.by/news/autobusiness/346004.html). At least one of their mining areas is highly irradiated. The radiation is so high that drivers reach their life-time radiation limit in about 6 months of driving. So they're automating their fleet of trucks to avoid the need to constantly replace drivers.

xanth 13y ago

I think this article should be called why Avatar doesn't work.

another-one-off 13y ago
Avatar the 2009 movie? A real mining company would have gone through local government and just have set up an underground mine, and tunneled under the tree-thing. Maybe done a study or two to assess the impact of mining tree roots. A project that big would go through quite some effort to appease the locals - otherwise the mine (basically inevitably) gets written off.

larsonf 13y ago

Does anyone have any insight into the underlying architecture of these large-scale projects? Like programming languages, project structure, how many software people involved? I imagine it's something along the lines of CERN or NASA projects in terms of size, although perhaps not complexity.

jacques_chester 13y ago

My Dad worked on this tangentially for a while, helping set up and maintaining the communications systems. Rio is also automating their trains, and minesite operations (a kind of "flight tower" for a minesite) have all been done remote for years. It looks a lot like an NOC, actually. Finding people to drive trucks for 100k+ is actually not that hard. You basically advertise a job: "drive trucks. Make big bucks" and people flock to it. But getting 2 or 3 different people to drive the same truck in shifts, and accommodating them, and flying them in and out, and feeding them ... it adds up. To an overhead that could run past a million dollars per year, per truck. And if you have an idle truck, that's lost money. But it's not even the money. Rio, like BHP Billiton, enjoys insane free cashflow right now. It's about protecting production from union activity. In the 80s the Western Australian mining industry was repeatedly crippled by huge fights between the mining giants and the unions, particularly the quite-militant CFMEU. A mix of legislative changes by a long-serving conservative government beginning in the mid 90s, plus generous individual contracts, broke the unions' grip on mining. And just in time for the mining boom. In 2007 a Labor government was elected and dramatically tilted the legislative tables back in favour of the unions. Then the GFC struck with full force and it so happened that Rio had just prior to it borrowed heavily to buy assets at the top of the market. So any prolonged interruption to production would be death. And so Rio have moved to make their mining operations as union-proof as possible. Automatic trucks is part of it. The ore trains too, parts of their port systems ... everything that can be made autonomous and/or remote is being made autonomous and remote.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Driving the trucks in a sane way and not flipping them over while turning is actually so boring that it is hard to find people who can and will do it and still get good productivity, at any pay rate. Source: Brother in law was a foreman at a strip mine.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I asked my old man about taking up truck driving. He said that I'd go insane with boredom.
13y ago

ck2 13y ago

When war becomes unmanned for the attackers, this world is going to become an incredibly terrifying place. Can you imagine the warmongers when there is little human cost and all you have to do is cut funding education or assistance to the poor to attack another nation? I really hope we get mandatory draft in the USA before this decade is out, it's the only way to stop the madness. If it becomes delegated to people sitting in trailers flying armed drones being yelled at to fire upon possibly innocent civilians, we are doomed.

Joeri 13y ago
It's already too late. The US military trains more drone pilots than fighter pilots. The undeclared drone war in pakistan has killed over 2000 so far. The future has come and gone.
- wepple 13y ago
  > The US military trains more drone pilots than fighter pilots. Was going to ask for a source - found several... back in 2009!
SimHacker 13y ago
The United States of America is under attack from the Republican Party.

fsiefken 13y ago

Am I the only one being reminded of the Dune spice harvester or sandcrawlers? "A large (often 120 meters by 40 meters) spice mining machine commonly employed on rich, uncontaminated melange blows (often called a "Crawler" because of a bug-like body on independent tracks)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_ships Harvester paper model (by 'The 4ce') http://papermau.blogspot.nl/2011/11/dunes-spice-harvester-paper-model-by.html http://papermau.blogspot.nl/2011/11/dunes-spice-harvester-pa... "Spice harvesters are large vehicles specialy designed to harvest the Spice Melange. Because of the rythmic sound they make, they are regularly eaten by Sandworms. When Muad' Dib asked Liet Kynes if they would see a sandworm while veiwing the spice harvesting, Kynes replied that they always come when they hear a spice harvester." http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spice_harvesters http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Spice_harvesters Dune2 images: https://www.google.com/search?q=spice+harvester+dune2&num=100&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=spice+harvester+dune2&num=10...

jpalomaki 13y ago

Sandvik is developing technology[1] that also changes the underground operations to automated and/or remotely controlled. Underground navigation technology comes from Navitec Systems [2]. I think they are using laser scanning to provide accurate positioning underground without requiring installation of beacons or cables. Accurate positioning is obviously important since it affects how fast the underground trucks can drive. [1] http://bit.ly/17dDq99 http://bit.ly/17dDq99 [2] http://www.navitecsystems.com/wordpress/en/referenssit/sandviks-automine/ http://www.navitecsystems.com/wordpress/en/referenssit/sandv...

hhandoko 13y ago

Some more info if anyone's interested: http://m2m.riotinto.com/issue/1/article/let-ballet-begin http://m2m.riotinto.com/issue/1/article/let-ballet-begin

TausAmmer 13y ago

This is cool and all, now how can we use this to kill people?