How mines control driverless trucks

It doesn’t get much further than this. I’m in the interior of Western Australia, at Rio Tinto’s largest Namuldi iron ore mine.

It takes about two hours north from Perth in an area called the Pilbara.

No one lives here permanently. About 400 workers are on site at any given time, and are flown in to work for between four and eight days, depending on their shift pattern, before returning home.

Giant trucks the size of houses, capable of transporting 300 tons, criss-cross the red earth roads in different sections of this open pit mine complex.

For an outsider like me, its size is intimidating enough, but doubling that feeling is knowing there’s no driver behind the wheel.

While touring the site in a regular company vehicle, a truck appeared approaching from a side road.

I sigh in relief as he deftly turns around and continues in the direction we just came. “Did that make you feel uncomfortable?” asks driver Dwayne Ballentine, a production supervisor.

Greater Namoldi has a fleet of more than 50 self-driving trucks that operate autonomously on pre-determined routes, along with a few trucks that remain manually driven and operate separately in a different part of the mine.

An autonomous water cart known as a Henry is also being tested, which, along with hand-driven carts, sprays mine roads to keep dust down.

My company’s vehicle is only able to work alongside self-driving trucks because it is equipped with a high-precision GPS, allowing it to be seen within a virtual system.

Before entering the autonomous mine area, we logged into this system and the controller checked via radio that we were visible.

It covers our car with a virtual bubble that self-driving trucks “see” and which makes it manage its proximity by slowing down or stopping as necessary.

A touch screen in our cabin displays all manned and autonomous vehicles and other equipment in the vicinity, along with “permission lines” showing the direct routes the self-driving trucks intend to take. If I had looked at the screen instead of worrying, I would have seen that truck about to turn.

In addition to all vehicles being equipped with a large red emergency button that can turn off the system, the self-driving trucks are equipped with front and rear lasers and radars to detect collision risks.

Sensors also detect obstacles. If a large rock falls from the back of a truck, sensors on the next truck will notice it and the vehicle will stop.

However, some of the trucks seem very delicate – on my tour I saw trucks simply breaking down due to rough roads.

These robots are coordinated and monitored by Rio Tinto’s Operations Center (OC) in Perth, about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) to the south.

It is the nerve center of all of the company’s Pilbara iron ore operations, which span 17 mines in total, including the three that make up Greater Namuldi.

From here it is guided by controllers, including more than 360 autonomous trucks in all locations (about 84% of the total fleet is automated); A mostly independent long-distance railway network to transport mined ore to port facilities; and approximately 40 independent trainings. OC employees also remotely control plant and port functions.

Autonomy is not new to Rio’s Pilbara operations: it began being introduced in the late 2000s.

Nor is it unique: Australia has the largest number of self-driving trucks and mines using automation of any country, and other mining companies in the Pilbara are using the technology as well.

But the scale at which Rio has expanded its operations here, including in the greater Namoldi region – which has one of the world’s largest autonomous truck fleets – gives it global significance.

It is a global trend. According to the Global Data website The number of self-driving pickup trucks worldwide has nearly quadrupled over the past four years to more than 2,000, most of them made by Caterpillar or Komatsu.

The biggest reason for introducing this technology is to improve the physical safety of the workforce, says Matthew Holkes, managing director of the company’s Pilbara mines.

Mining is a dangerous profession: heavy machinery can be operated unpredictably by people who may also become fatigued. “The data clearly shows that through automation, we have significantly safer work,” says Holz.

It also improved productivity by about 15%, he estimates. Independent equipment can be used more because there are no gaps due to shift changes or rest periods. Self-driving trucks can also travel faster when there is less equipment manned by employees at the scene.

Such automation is not cheap. Rio won’t reveal how much it has spent in total on the Pilbara automation cruise yet, but observers estimate it is in the billions of dollars.

At the same time, job opportunities developed. The story might be one of robots getting jobs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here yet.

While OC has roughly one controller for every 25 self-driving trucks – according to Rio, no one has lost their job to automation.

Instead, there were redeployments: truck drivers joined the command post as observers, were requalified to operate different pieces of equipment, such as excavators, cranes and bulldozers, or went on to drive hand trucks in different locations.

On the large open-plan floor of the OC, amid groups of monitors arranged in groups for the different mines, I met Jess Coy who used to work as a manual driller but now directs independent monitors from the central drilling pod. “I’m still digging holes in the ground… just without the dust and noise and being away from family,” she says.

Automation is bringing a “huge change” to safety in the mining industry, says Robin Burgess Limerick, a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, who studies human factors in mining. But this does not mean that there is no room for improvement.

Professor Burgess-Limerick analyzed incidents involving autonomous equipment reported to regulators.

As he sees it, the interfaces that employees use both in the field and in control centers to obtain information are not optimally designed. There were instances where field personnel lost situational awareness, which better display design could have prevented. “Technology designers should do more to keep people in mind,” he says.

There’s also a risk that console workloads will be overwhelming – it’s a busy, high-stakes job.

Overconfidence, where people become so confident that autonomous equipment will stop working that they start putting themselves at risk, can also be a problem, and suggests efforts should be directed toward improving the ability of the trucks themselves to detect moisture. There have been accidents where wet roads have caused a loss of traction.

Shane Rolston, coordinator of the Western Miners’ Alliance, which represents mining-related workers in the Pilbara, says there can be legitimate safety concerns regarding autonomous equipment.

He points to a serious incident last May, in which a self-driving train crashed into the back of a broken-down train, which workers at the front were repairing (they were evacuated before the train hit but were left shaken).

But Rolston also praises Rio in general because, over time, it has developed “some good strategies, procedures and policies” around how people interact with automated vehicles.

Rolston predicts that at some point, redistribution options will diminish, and there will be job losses. “It’s just math,” he says.

Meanwhile, Rio’s automation journey continues in the Pilbara with more trucks, drills and a Henry water cart. It is also closely monitoring the work being done by Komatsu and Caterpillar to develop workerless excavators, loaders and bulldozers.

Late in the afternoon, while waiting for the last flight back to Perth at Greater Namoldi Airport, the announcement comes that the flight has been canceled due to a problem with the plane. This means an additional 150 people will now need food and shelter. It’s nothing to Ryo, but I can’t help but think that we humans are complicated compared to robots.