In recent years, players focusing on the driverless sub circuit in mining areas have sprung up in China, which has greatly promoted the development of smart mines in China. Globally, the intelligent industrial transformation of mining areas originated in the United States, followed by Japan.
According to incomplete statistics of the new strategy low speed driverless Industry Research Institute, there are currently more than 10 representative driverless enterprises in foreign mining areas, focusing on Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. Up to now, these enterprises have made great progress in the technology and application of unmanned driving in mining areas.
Specific introduction of each enterprise:
Caterpillar
Since 1996, caterpillar has tested the first two prototype cat 777c driverless mining trucks at a limestone quarry in Texas. On a 2.6 mile site, two trucks completed more than 5000 production and transportation cycles.
Cat independently developed by caterpillar ? MineStar ? (mine star) system can help customers manage conveniently from material tracking to fleet, equipment health, driverless and other aspects through the five intelligent modules of fleet, terrain, detection, health and command. Through the use of sensors, on-board lidar and radar system, cat ? Driverless mining trucks have achieved all-weather driverless driving in mines all over the world.
In 2021, caterpillar announced the adoption of cat ? MineStar ? The transportation volume of (mine star) driverless mine cards exceeded 3 billion tons, and in 2022, it achieved the goal of "landing and operating more than 500 unmanned mine cards across the country" and carrying cat ? The total safe transportation volume of command automatic transportation system is more than 4 billion tons, and the automatic driving course is more than 145 million kilometers (the length is about 2.5 times the circumference of the earth).
Komatsu group
Komatsu group is one of the largest construction machinery and mining machinery manufacturing enterprises in the world. It was founded in 1921 and has a history of 90 years. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. In 1996, Komatsu developed the first driverless truck, which was mainly realized through the automated transportation system (AHS). The system uses control devices, GPS satellites, wireless communication technology and software to replace the driver sitting in the cab.
As of September 2021, more than 400 trucks equipped with Komatsu automated transportation system have been put into operation. At present, the frontrunner system can operate 24 hours a day and provide transportation services for customers in 13 mines in production on three continents. The materials transported include copper ore, iron ore, oil sand and coal. These vehicles and systems have stood the test in terms of safety, productivity, environmental tolerance and system flexibility, and there are no safety accidents during use. A good operator can operate up to 30 trucks as long as the dumping position of the mine is set in the AHS system, which greatly reduces the labor cost.
In March 2022, the tramcar equipped with Komatsu frontrunner automatic transportation system transported more than 4 billion tons of ore and rock, creating another industry first in the field of automatic transportation.
Volvo
In June 2016, Volvo truck released the world's first self driving mining vehicle and conducted field tests in an underground mine at an altitude of 1320M in Sweden. The Volvo FMX self driving truck used for operation is equipped with a radar and six sensors that can scan the internal obstacles nearly 1000 feet ahead; In this way, the truck adapts to the complex road conditions by virtue of the 3D map drawn by the environmental data transmitted by the sensor during the driving process, and optimizes and coordinates the driving route and fuel consumption of the truck according to the specific information.
In 2018, Volvo announced that it had signed a cooperation agreement with the Norwegian mine br ? NN ? y Kalk, and the first batch of commercial self driving transport trucks were put into use. Driverless trucks transported limestone from the mine to the designated port along 5 kilometers of roads and tunnels.
Volvo's autonomous transportation system product, namely Tara transportation solution, includes TA15 battery electric autonomous transportation vehicle. At present, the company is seeking the commercialization of TA15 autonomous transportation vehicle, which adopts battery electric drive system. This cableless truck is equipped with GPS, lidar and sensors, and allows connection with other TA15 trucks to achieve the best reprint and improve transportation efficiency.
Scania
Scania is one of the manufacturers of trucks and buses in Sweden. The automatic driving technology in the field of passenger cars has the ability of L3 level automatic driving. It can be driverless on the specified road without the intervention of the driver. People can sit in the driver's seat according to the real-time road condition information.
In 2019, Scania launched an driverless dump truck, Scania Axl, and realized real driverless driving in the cab. As the brain of the whole car, although the cockpit like module is retained in the front part of the car, there is no traditional equipment such as windshield and steering wheel, but an integrated engine system and high-precision sensor system.
At present, Scania Axl has a production version of the real car, but at this stage is not suitable for direct road, but in a small range of venues to carry out transportation work. Henrik henriksson, President and CEO of Scania, said, "with Scania Axl concept truck, we have taken an important step towards the future intelligent transportation system, in which driverless trucks will play an important role. Scania will continue to build and test concepts to prove what we can do with today's technology."
Liebherr
Liebherr group (Liebherr) has been conducting initial prototype testing of autonomous driving since 2016. In the future, it can provide turnkey overall solutions or open solutions for customers to integrate with third-party solutions, such as ASI compatible Mobius platform.
In 2021, Liebherr took autonomy, zero emissions and other major technologies as the research and development focus, and launched a new digital product suite "operational excellence", including truck loading assistant, performance monitoring, application severity and operation consistency features. At present, Liebherr's automation system has begun to play a role in many fields, including automobile manufacturing, aerospace, rail transit, shipbuilding, engineering machinery, general machining, new energy and other industries to provide a variety of general and non-standard professional integration solutions.
Burkhard richthammer, general manager of design and engineering of Liebherr mining equipment company, once said that Liebherr's mission is to develop trucks and automation systems, so that users can connect trucks with any kind of fleet management system, so that customers have the opportunity to choose a fleet management system.
ASI
Autonomous Solutions,Inc. It is a global leader in vehicle automation systems independent of suppliers, providing remote control, remote operation and fully automatic solutions for customers in mining, agriculture, automotive, government and manufacturing industries.
In 2018, ASI cooperated with Barrick gold in the self driving transportation project, refitting five Komatsu 930 eultra class mine cards and applying them to Barrick's Arturo mine. In October 2019, ASI and ferrexpo, the largest iron ore deposit in Europe, jointly refitted caterpillar 793d ore card and completed the commercial deployment test of autonomous driving.
In February 2020, ASI, together with epiroc (which has acquired 34% of ASI's shares), refitted the 77 multi brand hybrid truck fleets of Roy Hill, including Hitachi, for automatic driving, and integrated them with Roy Hill's existing wenco fleet management system
Although ASI occupies a very limited market for autonomous transportation systems, their auto drive system has been commercialized in the global agriculture, national defense, cleaning, security and other industries, with more than 1000 modified vehicles and 75 types of vehicles.
Hitachi Group
Hitachi Group was founded in 1910. Its predecessor was the motor repair factory of Jiuyuan mining Hitachi mine. Now, Hitachi has gradually embarked on the road of commercialization in the highly anticipated field of driverless mining.
Previously, Hitachi cooperated with Stanwell Corporation Limited, an Australian power company, to establish an driverless test site in meandu coal mine, about 100 kilometers inland from Brisbane, eastern Australia, to test dump trucks equipped with central control system, dump truck simulator and three dump trucks equipped with hybrid simulators, including eh5000ac-3 dump truck and ex3500 excavator.
In early 2021, Hitachi established a partnership with rajant, an American mobile network provider, to improve operational safety and productivity by using autonomous transportation systems in Australian coal mines. Robert schena, CEO of rajant, revealed, "in our joint coal mine deployment with Hitachi in Australia, there are currently six automatic hauling trucks in production." From 2020 to 2021, rajant will expand its scale to more than 45 vehicles.
Doosan group
In 2019, the intelligent mine solution "concept-x" of Doosan group completed its research and development. Its functions include image recognition, cognition, control technology, automatic driving technology, 5g remote control, UAV 3D measurement, calculation and distribution of workload, fault prediction technology and other advanced technologies of the fourth industrial revolution.
On March 10, 2020, at the international construction machinery exhibition in Las Vegas, USA, Doosan exhibited concept-x unmanned automation solution and doosanconnect telematics system. Among them, concept-x is a comprehensive construction site solution that measures the construction site through drones and 3D scanning, automatically analyzes and generates construction plans, and submits them to unmanned excavators, loaders, etc.
Based on front-end information and communication technology (ICT), doosanconnect can provide real-time diagnosis, key tips and data sharing by integrating monitoring hardware on Doosan products, so as to help customers manage and maintain equipment more effectively and reduce downtime, so as to significantly improve work efficiency and comprehensively optimize engineering projects.
Epiroc anbaituo
Anbaituo is a global productivity partner for mining and infrastructure customers. With groundbreaking technology, it focuses on developing and providing innovative and safe equipment, including automation, digitization and electrification solutions.
In 2017, the NexGen Sims (Sustainable intelligent mining system) project, sponsored by the European Union and led by anbaituo, began to operate. One of the main objectives of the Sims project is to demonstrate automated material handling technology in a real mining environment.
Jan Gustafsson, project manager and coordinator of anbaituo NexGen Sims, said that in this project, we will pay special attention to the material handling process, that is, the operation process of loading, transporting and dumping ore. It is hoped that by the end of the project in 2024, the NexGen Sims project can successfully demonstrate feasible solutions in a suitable mining environment. We will use positioning solutions and 5g networks for pilot tests and demonstrations, such as automatic loading and transportation with dump trucks.
summary
Judging from the development status of driverless enterprises in more than 10 mining areas, the United States is the birthplace of driverless technology, so it has significant advantages in talent accumulation and technology research and development, which also makes the United States have enough authority and voice in this field. Focusing on the segmentation scenario of unmanned mining areas, caterpillar has been studying the technology of driverless mining cars since the 1980s, and officially launched the first mining card in 1996, with no doubt about its leading position.
Japan also has rich experience in the research and development of driverless technology. As early as 2008, Komatsu group, a Japanese functional machinery and mining machinery company, began to cooperate with Rio Tinto, a mining company, to test the self-developed automatic transportation system (AHS) in Chile and Pilbara, Australia. While South Korea mainly focuses on the research and development of technologies such as autonomous driving chips and autonomous driving simulation tests, and some mechanical equipment manufacturers are involved in the track of unmanned mines.
At present, the five major global mining vehicle suppliers are conducting research on the application of automatic control and even driverless mining vehicles. Komatsu is one step ahead. Its ahs (automatic transportation system) has been equipped with more than 180 930e, which has been operating in Australia and Chile for many years; Caterpillar's minestar system is configured on 793f, and 12 iron mines of FMG company in Perth, Australia have been operated; Hitachi, Liebherr and Belas are also experimenting with driverless technology, and Volvo is also experimenting in mines. The development achievements of these enterprises also provide reference for the development of domestic enterprises to a certain extent.
The huge domestic market and talent base provide the soil for the development of each segment of the driverless track, and continue to achieve key technological breakthroughs in the field of driverless mines. At the same time, combined with rich overseas project experience, the current domestic driverless mine track is developing rapidly. Enterprises such as huituo, Bora, Lukai, tage and so on have repeatedly created global benchmark projects, which are powerful enough to compete with pioneer enterprises such as Carter and Komatsu, It perfectly interprets China's speed and power.
