Unlocking the Potential: Navigating the Role of Smaller Autonomous Trucks in Mining

Does size matter?

This question carries more weight now than ever before. As smaller autonomous trucks progress towards commercial viability and gain wider industry acceptance, it has never been a better time to talk about what role this class of truck can play in autonomous mining.

Traditionally, the focus and resources in autonomy gravitated towards ultra-class large haul trucks, recognized for their safety superiority over manually operated counterparts. However, they encounter challenges and limitations, particularly in manoeuvrability and efficiency within smaller, geographically confined mining areas.

When referring to smaller trucks, I am talking about 40 tonne rigid twin steer bogie drive trucks. These trucks significantly differ in size from traditional autonomous mining trucks and boast distinct advantages and specific user case scenarios, unsuitable for ultra-class trucks.

One of the biggest challenges with ultra class autonomous trucks is extracting acceptable efficiency and performance when mining in deeper open cut pits and working in areas with limited space. As the world's mined minerals become more difficult to come by, extracting maximum volume out of every reserve is more important than ever.

If the pit design hasn’t been designed to specifically accommodate ultra-class autonomous haul trucks from the beginning and as open cut pits become deeper, the available space for machinery to navigate efficiently becomes very challenging. AHS will require much more time, resources and skill to continue to make performance acceptable.

These small rigid autonomous trucks may provide an alternative to be able to take over where the traditional autonomous trucks find it too challenging. They will be able to efficiently extract every tonne of valuable minerals from deeper open cut pits and highly precise areas around infrastructure and geographical sensitive areas.

One of the biggest challenges to overcome will be how to integrate these smaller autonomous trucks into an already existing autonomous system so that they are able to interact safely and productively with pre-existing autonomous systems and machinery. To begin it’s possible that they will need to be separated and segregated from current AHS systems until new platforms can be developed to enable a fully integrated and co-mingling of the systems can be successful.

Absolute Autonomous has a huge amount of experience working with these autonomous haul systems and has developed strategies and operating techniques to improve performance and productivity when facing challenging conditions for autonomous trucks. We know what the capabilities and restrictions are of the current operating systems and how some of those can be overcome.

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