
Giant Robotic Mining Trucks in the Australian Desert - friism
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/bed4b2b5a70a
======
suprjami
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.

~~~
femto
It's possibly not GPS achieving the centimetre accuracy, but a localised
system, such as locata [1].

[1] [http://locata.com/](http://locata.com/)

~~~
jpalomaki
Wikipedia article [1] states that differential GPS can provide up to 10cm
accuracy.

Differential GPS works by having a local GPS receiver station which location
is well known. This station is comparing the location determined from the GPS
signal to its known location, calculates necessary corrections and sends the
information to other GPS receivers.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS)

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jacques_chester
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.

~~~
joonix
And for the Australians reading you can realize that Australia is toast if it
doesn't get its act together and put in a _real_ mining resource tax. You
can't just rely on employment from mining. The country's resources need to
enrich its people, not just foreign investors. Otherwise you're just being
robbed right before your eyes.

If Norway can do it why can't Australia?

~~~
tacticus
And the worst part of that stupid discussion is we already have a higher
petroleum resource rent tax applied the same way as the MRRT is meant to be.

~~~
jacques_chester
True, but there are some differences. The PRRT only applies offshore, where
the resources are owned by the _Commonwealth_ , not states. So there's no need
to dance around state royalties.

The second difference is that Hawke and Keating didn't just drop it like a
bombshell. They took their time to talk it through with the industry, over I
think it was about 18 months of consultation and negotiation.

------
eidosabi
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.

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Game_Ender
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
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
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/)

------
siculars
> 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.

~~~
another-one-off
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.

~~~
mcguire
"Finally, automated trucks will _provably do the right thing_ , all the
time,..."

[[Citation Needed]]

~~~
hhandoko
What the GP comment meant that the robots won't deviate from the parameters.

Contrast this with a human operator, who are instructed to drive at specific
speeds at each road section. Perhaps due to fatigue , overconfidence (e.g. I
drove on this road 1000's times before, I know what I am doing), or other
factors, the driver did not slow down enough and subsequently accidents occur.

------
fsiefken
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-
pa...](http://papermau.blogspot.nl/2011/11/dunes-spice-harvester-paper-model-
by.html)

"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=10...](https://www.google.com/search?q=spice+harvester+dune2&num=100&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

------
ck2
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
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
> The US military trains more drone pilots than fighter pilots.

Was going to ask for a source - found several... back in 2009!

------
ballard
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.

------
larsonf
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.

------
jpalomaki
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/sandv...](http://www.navitecsystems.com/wordpress/en/referenssit/sandviks-
automine/)

------
ChuckMcM
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.

------
hhandoko
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)

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

~~~
another-one-off
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.

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

~~~
billybob255
Medium is just a blogging platform

------
lifeformed
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
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.

------
riggins
goodbye truck driving jobs.

~~~
naterator
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
> _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
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
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..

~~~
el_zorro
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/)

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

