Komatsu’s Autonomous Haulage System, FrontRunner, is being deployed at Rio Tinto’s West Angelas Mine, East Pilbara operation, in Western Australia. This is the second deployment of the proprietary system following delivery of the first fleet to Codelco’s copper mines in Chile.

The FrontRunner system is comprised solely of Komatsu mining equipment, specifically, five units of autonomous dump trucks that use the 930E electric drive dump truck as a base machine, as well as a super-large PC5500 hydraulic excavator, D475A bulldozer, WD900 wheel dozer and GD825 motor grader.

The autonomous trucks navigate in the complex mining environment and can haul a 290-tonne (320-U.S.-ton) payload of overburden and ore without a driver. At the West Angelas Mine, the trucks are operated and controlled entirely using a supervisory computer at an operations center. In the future, the trucks will be controlled 24 hours a day from a remote operations center located more than 1,000 km (621 mi) away in Perth. All data from the trucks in use at the mine, including information on the location of the vehicles and their running status, can be verified via the supervisory computer. This is expected to contribute to a significant increase in productivity at the mine where it is difficult to secure sufficient manpower.

Note
The system excludes human element in Dump Truck operation. In that way such characteristics peculiar to the autonomous trucks as following:

• productivity increasing;
• exploiting Expenses decreasing;
• overhaul run increasing.

Autonomous Haulage System approved for Chile and Australia markets at present time.