Driverless mining operations in the Pilbara

Driverless trains, ore drills and even trucks are set to change the way mining in remote areas is done.

Rio Tinto, believing it had a three-year head start on the rest of the Australian industry, recently announced its plans to control and run its Pilbara iron ore operation as a fully automated site, controlled from a centre in Perth almost 1300 km away. This control centre is set for completion in 2009 and will house over 300 employees for overseeing all parts of the mining process.

Robert Fitch, a research fellow from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) based at the University of Sydney, states that research of automated transport technology has occurred for some time now. "Research into wheeled mobile robots goes back at least to the 1960s at Stanford. However, it wasn't until the 1980s that autonomous vehicles, as in robotic cars, started to gain traction. With the help of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge competitions, robot cars have also arrived in the public spotlight."

DARPA hosts and sponsors a number of autonomous competitions designed to further automation research and development. The first of these is the aforementioned Grand Challenge, based in the USA, featuring autonomous ground vehicles conducting military supply missions in a mock urban area. Another of these competitions is its Urban Platform project, in which Fitch has been involved, featuring navigation and mapping of vehicle motion.

"There are a number of practical reasons for this research. One is that industrial robots can move cargo from place to place inexpensively, because they work 24 hours per day with reliable performance, even in darkness. Another is safety statistics that tell us that the concept of humans driving their own cars is a very dangerous proposition, as autonomous cars promise to reduce traffic fatalities caused by human error," says Fitch.

"The first application of our research will be industrial and military, most likely in the next 10 years. This will be followed by driverless vehicles on public roads, probably in the next 20 years."

Rio's mine-to-port automation signifies the beginning of these applications in Australian industry, and is also set to provide a solution to the company's problem of manpower, particularly in remote and arid areas such as the Pilbara. The use of this technology is also expected to encourage greater efficiency, lower production costs and more attractive working conditions.

The project is not yet complete or fully operational; however, the plans and preparations for the project were underway only a few short days after the announcement. With the help of Komatsu FrontRunner Autonomous Haulage System technology, and aid from key researchers at the University of Sydney, the system is set to be commissioned by the end of this year.

Fabio Ramos, a senior research associate from ACFR, was directly involved with Rio Tinto in developing certain parts of the company's plans for automation, and has been involved with the company for the past two years with drill projects. "The Rio Tinto project is a collection of projects, each focused on a different area. My specialisation with them for the past two years has been the development and implementation of automated drills. Komatsu have a relationship with Rio Tinto that has lasted over 15 years, and thus they were the perfect candidates for developing the automated trucks side of the operation."

"The key to automating the mining site is trying to bring these projects, and ultimately the machinery, to work together as a system that operates the mine as a whole. This is the reason for researching, testing and developing each area first, before bringing it together. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to increase efficiency and flexibility in the running of the mine," said Ramos.

"Previous drill methods were too slow and not accurate enough to maximise rock availability. One of the advantages of automated drills within mines is the ability to gain information about the rock contents before drilling, as is obviously not available when driven by manpower. Even the smallest amounts of information provided by robots in the mining environment are beneficial to the entire mining process. It's these small amounts of information that make all the difference."

"Over the last 10 years, robotic technology has grown and developed much more than was expected, so opportunities like this, along with DARPA projects and competitions, are very exciting indicators of robotic technology's future uses."

The Pilbara project is planned to consist of driverless trains, some of which reach 2.4 km in length, some carrying over 100 megatonnes of resource per year; driverless Komatsu flagship 930E-4 electric drive trucks, delivering a 290 metric tonne payload of overburden and ore; and unmanned drills on the site itself.

This technology has been utilised just once in the mining industry, with the first automated fleet deployed in a mining operation in Codelco, Chile, also supplied by Komatsu. This Australian project is thus the second fleet to use this system. From here there are plans to extend this system to new and existing iron ore operations owned and run by Rio Tinto throughout the country by 2010.