Rio Tinto deploys driverless trucks

Rio Tinto has deployed 69 driverless trucks across three iron ore mine sites in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The trucks are controlled from an operations centre in Perth, over 1200 kilometres away.

According to a report on the ABC news website, this is a world first and is already delivering cost-saving benefits.

Josh Bennett, operations manager at one of the sites, spoke with the ABC about the impact, “To the naked eye it looks like conventional mining methods. I guess the key change for us is the work that employees and our team members are doing now,” he said.

“What we have done is map out our entire mine and put that into a system and the system then works out how to manoeuvre the trucks through the mine.”

Given that the trucks can run full time without a driver, savings are estimated at around 500 man-hours per year, per truck.

While the move slashes operational costs, it also removes dangerous jobs and delivers a degree of consistency that is not possible with the human equivalent.

“It is quite challenging to get repeatability out of a human, one of the advantages we have had with autonomous haulage particularly in the truck fleet we notice we are getting consistency in terms of the way the machines are operating.

“One of the biggest costs we have got is maintaining mobile assets, so we spend a lot of time on our operator training, education.

“So, there is obvious capital savings, in terms of setting up camps, flying people to site, there is less people so there is less operating costs, but there are some costs that come into running the system and maintenance of the system as well,” Bennett told the ABC. 

Rio Tinto plans to explore automation further and is currently trialling other systems, with a view to most of the supply chain from pit to port being controlled remotely.

While this obviously means job losses, it creates other new opportunities and positions, as the process still needs humans to oversee and optimise operations and to carry out maintenance requirements.