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Driverless Trucks

2015-10-19 16:20:59.132389+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Two Australian mines are now operating with an all-driverless fleet of trucks

GPS guides the trucks and allows them to deliver iron ore 24/7, 365 days a year, without the kinds of breaks and handover periods that human drivers would need. The GPS navigation system is backstopped by a team of human operators working remotely from Perth, hundreds of miles away. Not only does this reduce the total number of humans who are needed to run the trucking operation, but it eliminates the need to employ those humans in the remote and desolate mining country. A mine needs to be located where the ore is, and you often end up needing to pay a premium to recruit workers to ore-adjacent locations. Remote workers, by contrast, can live in a nice suburb of a midsize city.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

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#Comment Re: Driverless Trucks made: 2015-10-19 18:55:21.620586+00 by: Larry Burton [edit]

Back in 2004 I was working on the control systems of a packaging line for a paper plant that used self guided vehicles in their warehouse to deliver the packaged product from the packaging line to placing robots in the warehouse. I'm thinking the system was several years old when I was there. The SGVs were guided by signal wire embedded in the floor.

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