Zoe Corbyn
Fifty of these giant driverless trucks work in the Greater Nammuldi iron mine
It doesn't get much further than that. I'm in inland Western Australia at Rio Tinto's Greater Nammuldi iron ore mine.
It's about a two-hour flight north of Perth, in an area called the Pilbara.
No one lives here permanently. Around 400 workers are on site at any one time, and they are flown in, working between four and eight days, depending on their work schedule, before returning home.
Giant trucks the size of townhouses, capable of carrying 300 tons, crisscross red dirt roads in different sections of this open-pit mining complex.
For a foreigner like me, their size is intimidating enough, but that feeling is multiplied by knowing that there is no driver behind the wheel.
While visiting the site in a full-size company vehicle, one of the trucks appears, coming from a side road.
I sigh in relief as he deftly turns and continues in the direction we just went. “Did that make you uncomfortable?” asks the driver of the vehicle, Dwane Pallentine, production superintendent.
Zoe Corbyn
“Henry”, the autonomous water cart sprays roads to reduce dust
Greater Nammuldi has a fleet of more than 50 autonomous trucks that operate independently on predefined routes, as well as a handful that remain manually driven and work separately in another part of the mine.
Also being tested is a self-driving water cart, affectionately known as the Henry, which, along with manually driven ones, sprays mine roads to reduce dust.
The company vehicle I'm in can only operate alongside autonomous trucks because it is equipped with high-precision GPS, which allows it to be seen within a virtual system.
Before entering the closed autonomous zone of the mine, we connected to this system and a controller verified by radio that we were visible.
It enclosed our vehicle in a virtual bubble that autonomous trucks “see” and which causes them to manage their proximity by slowing down or stopping if necessary.
A touchscreen in our cab displays all manned and autonomous vehicles and other equipment nearby, along with “permission lines” that indicate the immediate routes the autonomous trucks intend to take. If I had looked at the screen instead of worrying, I would have seen that the truck was going to turn.
In addition to being equipped with a large red emergency button to turn off the system, the autonomous trucks have lasers and radars at the front and rear to detect the risk of collision.
The sensors also detect obstacles. If a large rock fell from the back of a truck, the sensors on the next truck would notice it and the vehicle would stop.
However, some trucks seem particularly susceptible: on my tour, I see a few simply foiled by bumpy roads.
Coordination and monitoring of these robots is carried out by Rio Tinto's Operations Center (OC) in Perth, approximately 1,500 km (930 miles) to the south.
It is the nerve center for all of the company's Pilbara iron ore operations, which span 17 mines in total, including the three that make up Greater Nammuldi.
Guided from there by controllers, include more than 360 autonomous trucks across all locations (approximately 84% of the total fleet is automated); an essentially self-sustaining long-distance rail network to transport mined ore to port facilities; and nearly 40 autonomous drills. OC staff also remotely control factory and port functions.
Autonomy is not new to Rio's Pilbara operations: its introduction began in the late 2000s.
It's also not unique: Australia has the most autonomous trucks and other mining equipment of any country, and other mining companies in the Pilbara are also using the technology.
But the scale to which Rio has grown its operations here, including in Greater Nammuldi – which has one of the largest fleets of autonomous trucks in the world – gives it global significance.
And it’s a global trend. According to GlobalData, the number of autonomous transport trucks worldwide has almost quadrupled over the past four years to more than 2,000, with most manufactured by Caterpillar or Komatsu.
Rio Tinto
Trucks and other mining equipment are monitored in a control room in Perth
The main reason for introducing the technology was to improve the physical safety of the workforce, says Matthew Holcz, general manager of the company's Pilbara mines.
Mining is a dangerous profession: heavy machinery can be used unpredictably by people who can also become fatigued. “The data clearly shows that automation makes our business significantly safer,” says Holcz.
It also improved productivity – by about 15%, he estimates. Stand-alone equipment can be used more because there are no interruptions due to shift changes or breaks. And autonomous trucks can also go faster when there is less equipment operated by personnel on site.
Such automation is expensive. Rio won't disclose what it has spent in total so far on its Pilbara automation journey, but observers put it at several billion dollars.
In the meantime, job opportunities have evolved. The story could be about robots taking jobs, but that doesn't seem to be the case here so far.
While the OC has about one controller for every 25 autonomous trucks, according to Rio, no one has lost their job due to automation.
Instead, there have been redeployments: truck drivers have joined the CO as controllers themselves, have been reskilled to operate different equipment, such as excavators, loaders and bulldozers, or are went to drive hand trucks at different sites.
On the large open floor of the OC, among the rows of monitors arranged in clusters for the different mines, I meet Jess Cowie who used to be a manual driller but now directs the autonomous drillers from the central drilling pod. “I always make holes in the ground… just without the dust, the noise and without being far from the family,” she says.
Zoe Corbyn
Each mining truck can transport 300 tons of rocks
Automation is bringing a “step change” in terms of 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 that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement.
Professor Burgess-Limerick analyzed incidents involving autonomous equipment reported to regulators.
According to him, the interfaces used by personnel in the field and in control centers to obtain information are not optimally designed. There were situations where field personnel lost situational awareness, which better screen design could have avoided. “Technology designers should try a little harder to take people into account,” he says.
There is also a risk that the workload for controllers will be overwhelming: it is busy, high-stakes work.
Overconfidence, in which people become so sure that autonomous equipment will shut down that they start putting themselves in harm's way, can also be a problem, and he notes that efforts need to be made to improve truck capability themselves to detect humidity. There have been incidents where wet roads have caused them to lose traction.
There can be legitimate safety concerns with autonomous equipment, says Shane Roulstone, coordinator of the Western Mine Workers Alliance, which represents mining workers in the Pilbara.
He mentions a serious incident in May, in which an autonomous train hit the back of a broken down train, which workers at the front were repairing (they evacuated before it hit but were shaken).
But Mr. Roulstone also praises Rio in general for having, over time, developed “good strategies, procedures and policies” regarding how people interact with automated vehicles.
Mr Roulstone expects that at some point redeployment opportunities will diminish and there will be job losses. “It’s just a math question,” he says.
Meanwhile, Rio's automation journey in the Pilbara continues with more trucks, drills and Henry the water cart. It is also closely monitoring work by Komatsu and Caterpillar to develop unmanned excavators, loaders and bulldozers.
Late in the afternoon, while we were waiting at Greater Nammuldi Airport for the last flight back to Perth, it was announced that it had been canceled due to a problem with the plane. This represents 150 additional people who will now need to be fed and housed. It's nothing for Rio, but I can't help but think that we humans are complicated compared to robots.
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