Abroad: origin of driverless mining area
The development of driverless mining trucks originated abroad. In the 1980s, Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction machinery and mining equipment, first started the research and development of driverless dump trucks.
From 1994 to 1995, Caterpillar tested the first two Cat 777C driverless mining truck samples at a limestone quarry in Texas, USA. On the 2.6 mile site, two trucks completed more than 5000 production and transportation cycles.
In 1996, Caterpillar officially launched an automated mining dump truck. During MINExpo in 1996, the audience witnessed the unmanned demonstration in Tinaja Hill Demonstration and Learning Center through live satellite broadcast.
After Caterpillar, Komatsu also developed the first driverless truck in 1996, mainly through the Automated Haulage System (AHS). The system uses control devices, GPS satellites, wireless communication technology and software to replace the driver sitting in the cab.
In 2005, Komatsu developed the unmanned transportation system, which was tested in Northern Copper Mine Company, the largest branch of Chilean state-owned copper company. Through sensors, controllers, communication components and other equipment, Komatsu realized the automatic driving of mining cars under some control commands.
In 2008, Komatsu's autonomous mining vehicle was commercially deployed in copper mines in Chile for the first time. At the end of the same year, several iron mines of Rio Tinto in Australia began to operate Komatsu's unmanned mine card. Because of its remote location, the control center was built in Perth, a large city about 1500 kilometers away from the mine, for remote control. In 2013, the oil sands mines in Canada also began to use Komatsu's unmanned transportation system.
In September 2017, in order to further expand the value of automatic transportation system, Komatsu successfully completed the trial operation of adding automatic transportation system kits to standard dump trucks in the existing mining areas of Rio Tinto, an Australian mining giant. This set of refitted accessories installed on Komatsu 220 ton 830E electric drive standard dump truck can enable the truck to operate in the automatic driving mode.
After Caterpillar and Komatsu, some enterprises, such as Volvo, Liebherr and Hitachi Group, began to invest in the development of driverless plans in mining areas.
At present, the driverless technology of mining cars has been preliminarily realized in North America, Western Australia and South Africa. Including the use of Caterpillar's driverless mining dump truck in the Kimberley Bar mine in Australia; Binham Copper Mine in Utah, the United States, cooperated with American ASI Company to carry out technical transformation on the excavator, and developed and used the mine driverless management system; The Kalk mine in Norway has landed the first commercial project of Volvo driverless mine card; Chile National Copper also plans to bring its driverless mine truck fleet project to a new stage, deploying four new Caterpillar driverless mine trucks in the Ministro Hales (DMH) branch mine, while the other four Zixiaosong driverless mine trucks will be deployed in the Radomiro Tomic branch mine, etc.
In addition, foreign driverless system modification technology is also maturing for in-service vehicles. For example, the transformation of mining dump trucks of Komatsu 930E and Caterpillar 777D, the transformation of Volvo A40F articulated trucks, and the transformation of L218 skid loaders in New Zealand and the Netherlands. The transformation technology of more than 18 models has been applied in mines in North America and Western Australia.
Domestic: started late, but developed rapidly
Compared with foreign countries, domestic exploration of driverless mining areas started late. Sandaozhuang Mine of Luoyang Molybdenum Group took the lead in using unmanned mining equipment in China in 2017, but it adopts remote control mode, and the 4G network has a long delay, which cannot give play to the advantages of unmanned driving. In 2019, 5G will be used, and the effect will be improved.
In September 2018, Baotou Steel Group, Tagge Zhixing, Northern Stock, University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China Mobile and Huawei signed a contract to jointly promote the world's largest rare earth open-pit mine, the Baiyunebo mine driverless project. In November 2018, Tagge Zhixing completed the unmanned upgrading and transformation of two MT3600B, NTE150t large ore trucks and one Tongli 90t wide body vehicle in the Baiyunebo mining area, and the development of the unmanned mining vehicle management system, It has achieved significant progress in mixed marshalling test and operation of vehicles of different manufacturers and different tonnage.
In 2018, Chengmenshan Copper Mine started the construction of intelligent mines, which is the first non-ferrous open-pit mine in China to use driverless mining vehicles. Its unmanned mining vehicles also achieved joint operation with the world's first high-power 5G remote control bulldozer
Since 2018, the domestic exploration of unmanned driving in mining areas has gradually increased. Some mining areas have cooperated with construction machinery manufacturers and unmanned driving solution providers to start small batch testing.
From the perspective of the implementation of the unmanned mine card project, at present, China is dominated by the intelligent transformation of open-pit coal mines, and has gradually made progress in mining areas with different types of minerals, such as non-ferrous metals and cement mines. Among them, the unmanned driving projects in some mining areas are not only leading in China, but also become a benchmark in the world.
Considering the development of unmanned driving at home and abroad, there are three main differences between the domestic and foreign unmanned driving market in mines:
① Differences in technical proposal stages. The automatic driving scheme of foreign mining areas is basically embedded in the overall mine automation solution, while there will be unmanned ground mining, unmanned ground transportation, unmanned underground mining and digital management scheme of the whole mine. At present, mine automatic driving in China is at the initial stage. However, with the national rectification and policy support in recent years, the mining industry has gradually changed to the leading enterprise to develop high-quality mining resources. Due to the scale effect, these leading enterprises have also begun to have a strong demand for new energy and automatic driving, which are mainly concentrated on unmanned transportation.
② The distribution of mines is different. Foreign mines are relatively concentrated, and the output of a single mine is huge, so they can be transformed as a whole. However, in China, mines are relatively scattered, the size of mines is different, the technical level is not high, and mining equipment is backward, which makes the level of China's mining equipment manufacturing industry a certain distance from that of developed countries, and there is little attention paid to more advanced automatic driving technology.
③ Common car body differences. In foreign countries, the single truck with a price of tens of millions of yuan and a load of 100-400 tons is mostly used, which is not applicable to domestic small and medium-sized mines. In China, most of them are wide body trucks with eight rear wheels.
Mining belongs to the category of homeland security. In addition to restrictions such as trade policies, it is difficult for foreign enterprises to enter and apply to the Chinese market. To some extent, this gives space and opportunities for the development of China's autonomous driving enterprises. In the long run, with rich application soil and strong support of relevant policies, unmanned driving in China's mining areas is expected to overtake on curves!
In order to analyze the current solution and market application status of low-speed unmanned driving in mining areas, on December 16, Qingdao Huituo Intelligent Machine Co., Ltd., Beijing E-Control Intelligent Driving Technology Co., Ltd., Shanghai Bora Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing Road Kaizhixing Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing Tage Intelligent Driving Technology Co., Ltd The Blue Book for the Development of the Mine Unmanned Driving Industry (2022 Edition) jointly compiled by Mingshang Technology Co., Ltd. will be officially released at the 2022 China Low Speed Unmanned Driving Industry Development Annual Conference. Participants can get a paper copy of the blue book for free. Please look forward to it!
