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Mining Companies Are Using Autonomous Trucks, Drills and Trains To Boost Efficiency, Reduce Employees (technologyreview.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Mining companies are rolling out autonomous trucks, drills, and trains, which will boost efficiency but also reduce the need for human employees. Rio Tinto uses driverless trucks provided by Japan's Komatsu. They find their way around using precision GPS and look out for obstacles using radar and laser sensors. The company's driverless trucks have proven to be roughly 15 percent cheaper to run than vehicles with humans behind the wheel -- a significant saving since haulage is by far a mine's largest operational cost. Trucks that drive themselves can spend more time working because software doesn't need to stop for shift changes or bathroom breaks. They are also more predictable in how they do things like pull up for loading. "All those places where you could lose a few seconds or minutes by not being consistent add up," says Rob Atkinson, who leads productivity efforts at Rio Tinto. They also improve safety. The driverless locomotives, due to be tested extensively next year and fully deployed by 2018, are expected to bring similar benefits. They also anticipate savings on train maintenance, because software can be more predictable and gentle than any human in how it uses brakes and other controls. Diggers and bulldozers could be next to be automated.
Rio Tinto uses driverless trucks provided by Japan's Komatsu.
Damn foreign trucks stealing our jobs. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
While the deaths of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds are sad, the reactions are hilarious!
And yeah, the autonomous mining trucks are cool. Autonomous farm equipment are also awesome. The unions finally need to adjust their expectations. 5 cents per hour is my best offer!
not using mules and canaries either
They can't do that, we voted Trump in so that he can save all our the manual labor jobs. We love our real american blue collar jobs, we love building stuff, working hard in factories and mines and going home and drinking beer. We are uninterested in learning new fangled skills. AI and job loss is just a hollywood movie concept, it's not real. We are so glad we got our good ole white guy daddy Trump to make everything right again, he'll put an end to this technology crap
We had the technology from about the seventies to have a smart grid of trains to go to multiple locations, but no one wanted to invest in infrastructure like that. If instead of a road system, you had cards guide by wire or a rail hookup, it could be fully automated already without all the tricky edge cases.
God spoke to me
Farm equipment has been automated for quite sometime. Even Artic fishing has a heavy amount of automation. I am surprised that this sector has taken this long to automate things like trains and haulers...
Now digger automation I would like to see; where you trace out a 3D volume and let it go. It doesn't seem as simple as at first glance. Soil densities vary and you run into obstacles that need a little planning and strategy. Doing it wrong can break some expensive parts or at least wear them out faster. Neat times ahead, hope someone posts some YouTube vids.
Very good news.
Too much death and long-term negative effects on the health of people involved in the mining industry, regardless of technological advancement.
In addition to that, regardless of various safety regulations and laws and struggles to enforce safety in the mining industry, most of it sooner or later went down the drain or had trivial influence.
Better take people out of the equation as much as possible in this sector and have them learn and do better stuff to do safer jobs.
A big motivating reason for using the automated trucks is reduced wear on the tires. Each tire costs a small fortune. Extending their life by 5 to 10% is a big deal.
the world used to need ditch diggers! Now I need to punch the CEO in the face so I can go to lock up to get health coverage. As no plan will take me as that think I have miners lung or something and with no job I can''t pay 10K mo for a plan with pre existing conditions covered.
they've had "driverless" trucks at strip mines for a long time now. there is a command center nearby with humans remotely controlling the trucks like an RTS game.
Coincidentally I was just looking at their stock and that P/E ratio screams avoid.
That should more than offset the drivers put out of work by this.
Read up on Henry Ford and why he paid his workers well.
And also consider that 70% of our economy is consumption. The rich can only buy so many cars and pillows and the revenues of their investments are dependent on us little people buying those iThings, cars, borrowing money for college so that we can get decent jobs to make money to pay for that loan, get mortgages, car loans, pay the taxes so the military can be funded to protect the rich's investments abroad, and medical and food.
But they are hoping that the developing world will take up the slack - that's why they don't care when jobs are sent overseas or are replaced with cheap immigrants.
That booming middle class in China has been making them richer while a handful of us peons benefit from it. Sure, that designer in California has a great job, but all those folks who lost their jobs to the Chinese and southeast Asian workers are SOL. The same goes for the folks who are displaced by automation. Where do they go? Retraining? For what? There are only so many jobs in any field - not enough to absorb all those workers who have been displaced.
And companies won't hire a 30+ year old entry level person. And if you're middle aged? NFW. Being a 50 something and unemployed means you're unemployable.
tl;dr; our economy is changing dramatically and there's going to be some painful adjustments. Trump's election was just one symptom. All those working class people who have been screwed over by globalization and automation are getting REAL pissed. And the Democrats were more worried about who can use what restroom; so they lost.
The company's driverless trucks have proven to be roughly 15 percent cheaper to run than vehicles with humans behind the wheel -- a significant saving since haulage is by far a mine's largest operational cost.
I'm hoping that their new largest operational cost is prevention and mitigation of the pollution and environmental damage they create. Now that these companies can no longer claim to be the source of as many jobs, they should have a harder time externalizing these costs.
Okay, fat chance.
No offence intended but there are always tricky edge cases. Reality is more complicated than we realize.
As hard as it is to lose your job, we've come a long way from the days when "consumption" would be diagnosed in 20-year olds who died a couple years later. Even in the USA where we tend to take worker safety more seriously, it's still a chance of death every time a worker goes underground.
The problem of what to do with displaced workers is not new. It's time we found a real solution. One that doesn't involve violent revolution/communism. Been there, done that. One that doesn't involve bogus "re-training" programs where they spend $100 million and can only point to 20 successful re-trained workers. I don't profess to have a magic answer, but it's probably going to look more like socialism than Republicans would like, and less like socialism than some Democrats would like. We're going to have to care for people without coddling them.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
At least we can retrain them to make air conditioners, right?
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Get the miners out, let the big-ass machines think for themselves, see what happens. Shit happens, software gets tweaked, try again. Lather rinse repeat.
Good side is fewer miners get trapped in cave-ins. Bad side is those miners are now on unemployment.
No offence intended but there are always tricky edge cases. Reality is more complicated than we realize.
And yet, there are still dramatically fewer of them if you put the vehicles on rails. Ideally you'd have the vehicles locked to the track in the same way as a roller coaster, to keep them from falling off even in extreme circumstances.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>no one wanted to invest in infrastructure like that
Right. The tech that "will" obsolete millions has been sitting outside the front door for ages; it's just that the ROI of using a $800,000 burger flipper doesn't pitch well.
Drop a zero and every city will instantly have hundreds of illness-susceptible, bladder-needing, flesh-based students desperate to find a way to sell themselves. There will probably be several new ways to take advantage of them - no, not just that one.
Yet they're the smart ones, dutifully trying to pay our glorified diploma mills (their relative cost will have doubled again by the end of this post) because they heard that everyone will need to have the same exclusive skills (do you really not see the oxymoron) to survive the new world, while avoiding the predatory scam we have somehow mislabeled with the euphemism "student loans".
Humans? Please remind me- what's their function again? I vaguely remember them doing something...
"We had the technology from about the seventies to have a smart grid of trains to go to multiple locations..."
Yup, it was called BART. I got involved slightly when they were on their Second Generation RTOS. The problem was as the System in simulation got consistently more sophisticated, as more and more sensors were added, it got to the point that when MTBF was factored in, at any given time, it Broke. (My minor contribution was working on inserting a token into the Device Addresses that requested Diagnostics, on a regular precisely defined basis. Which made it Break even more...) But things improved over the decades, and BART does pretty much run itself now, even though overall equipment reliability is still dreadful.
One recurring complaint about BART to this day is that the Train Operators do nothing, they just sit on their well-paid butts and let the Trains run themselves. But they are actually there for those times when Things Break, for when people jump in front of Trains, for... unexpected... situations:
http://sfist.com/2014/04/22/man_spotted_having_sex_with_bart_se.php
"...but no one wanted to invest in infrastructure like that."
Actually, BART spent a _lot_ of money on this, and still does. It is much easier for the Mining Companies; by taking out Humans, the Human Safety Record improves. But this doesn't work for BART, which isn't hauling tons of Rock, but >100 tons of Flesh, for a fully loaded 10 Car Train, during Rush Hour.
Later, when the owners have saved all they can save from automation and still need more money, they'll just start robbing banks, I guess.
It's super boring. Pick up dirt, move dirt over there. Extract gold. Move dirt back to where you found it. Repeat until insane.
You also want the trains walled off and with a roof, or a subway. That eliminates animals/weather/kids as hazards. It also eliminates most of the risk of someone touching the overhead power lines powering the train cars, and putting it underground will free up enough expensive property to pay for the entire system.
putting it underground will free up enough expensive property to pay for the entire system.
Hmm, citation needed. One of the advantages of an elevated system is that you don't have to bury it, and it also doesn't use up much real estate. I question whether you could cost-effectively bury transportation systems under existing cities today, as compared to having to deal with the weather instead which has been relatively well solved by the auto industry already.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No offence intended but there are always tricky edge cases. Reality is more complicated than we realize.
The worst edge cases by far are drunk, senile, texting and/or plain old incompetent drivers. Yet we're developing autonomous vehicles that can mix in with those and perform acceptably.
By comparison, it would be a piece of cake to develop a dedicated transport system, allowing only automated traffic, with a safety level that's an order of magnitude better than current public highways.
Until you realize they already have the automated military hardware and massive stockpiles of ammunition.
Oh yeah and giant frickin 100 ton dumptrucks that could drive over your entire neighborhood.
All autonomous and capable of being reprogrammed to ignore or even home in on human obstacles.
So yeah, don't be surprised when you find yourself well and truly fucked.
About 40-60% of the Dallas Texas DART light rail system is above grade, except for where it's already on existing railroad grades, or the brief ~1 mile subway section under the dense suburban area just north of downtown. It works really well, there's almost 0 at grade crossings in the most densely populated areas.
moox. for a new generation.
So this could be part of the Trump Infrastructure Program? It will put people to work building it until it is built and they have nothing else to do.
I got into a debate with a liberal room mate back in the 60s because of his constant whining about the poor farm labor wages. I finished him off by saying that farmers would just go to more farming automation rather than pay exorbitant wages. Thus liberal ideas of "helping the poor", which is only a vote luring trick, has been skirted by technology. If any of those union mining truck drivers need a job, my city is in desperate need of garbage truck drivers.
I know mining is a tough life but reducing your employees sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
At least they aren't being oxidised.
It has been going on few hundred years. We better get use to it.
The coal industry now employs 10% of the miners it did 50 years ago... because they've gone to mountaintop removal, and whatever other names they use for moving the whole surface above the seams, and then they use large machinery, rather than many, many miners going down into the ground.
Those hundreds of thousands of jobs will never come back. The industry in the US employs now in the tens of thousands.
Jobs? Oh, say the libertidiots, "just move, doesn't matter that's your home, family and friends, go find a burger flipping job far, far away. We don't have families, or care about anyone but ourselves, and you should be the same".
And as a side note, I *NEVER* saw homeless people - and I grew up in Philly - until Raygun.
Past time for a basic minimum paid to everyone by the government, the way that the folks in Alaska get a reverse income tax from the state's oil revenues.