Caterpillar hits big milestone

Roughly nine months after reaching the 4-billion-tonne milestone, trucks equipped with Cat MineStar Command for hauling have now moved over five billion tonnes of material since the company placed its first fleets of autonomous trucks in Western Australia in 2013.

In addition, Cat autonomous trucks are on pace to eclipse previous record totals of materials hauled in a calendar year, projected to be more than 1.4 billion tonnes in 2022, the company said.

Currently, more than 550 mining trucks are equipped with Command for hauling, operating across three continents. Over the last nine years, trucks equipped with Command for hauling have journeyed nearly the average distance between the Earth and Mars with zero loss-time injuries, Caterpillar said.

“In 2013, we placed our first fleets of autonomous trucks in Western Australia at FMG Solomon and BHP Jimblebar,” said group president of Caterpillar Resource Industries, Denise Johnson.

“Since that time, trucks using Command for hauling have safely traveled nearly 200 million kilometres, more than twice the experience in autonomous operations of any automobile manufacturer.

“Caterpillar has grown the number of autonomous trucks in operation by 40 per cent in the past two years. We believe that automation is one of many keys to implement technology that unlocks the value miners need when it comes to the energy transition toward more sustainable operations.”

Marc Cameron, vice president of Caterpillar Resource Industries, said the new Cat 798 AC electric drive trucks replacing BHP’s entire haul truck fleet at the Escondida mine will feature technologies that advance the site’s key initiatives, including autonomy and decarbonisation.

“The agreement allows Escondida BHP to accelerate the implementation of its autonomy plans by transitioning the fleet with autonomous haulage system (AHS) technology.”

Since its autonomous haulage solutions got to work almost a decade ago, 13 of Caterpillar’s customers at 23 different locations have integrated Caterpillar’s AHS into their operations, ferrying around a wide variety of materials including iron ore, oil sands, copper, gold, coal, lithium and phosphate.

Spanning the 190- to 370-tonne class sizes, the Cat 789D, 793D, 793F, 797F, and electric drive 794 AC and 798 AC mining trucks are capable of fully autonomous operation. Retrofit kits allow miners to expand Command for hauling to existing Cat mining trucks.

“In 2023, we will expand Command for hauling to the 139-tonne (153-ton) truck class at ioneer Ltd’s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron mine,” said vice president and general manager for Cat Mining, Sean McGinnis.

“This is the first lithium-boron greenfield project in the United States to use an AHS. We are now seeing a shift toward autonomy requested on new Cat trucks.

"Whereas large mines with fleet sizes of more than 70 trucks were the early adopters of the technology, we are seeing economic viability for autonomy at smaller mines with a fleet of less than 15 trucks.”

Beyond expansion of Command for hauling to the Cat 785 for ioneer, Caterpillar sees potential for autonomy in quarry and aggregates.

Additionally, Caterpillar’s AHS technology has been deployed on the Cat 789D autonomous water truck (AWT) operating at Rio Tinto’s Gudai-Darri mine in Australia, the world’s first AWT, for automated watering of haul roads.

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