PRESS RELEASE: The signing took place at the INNOPROM 2018 international industrial exhibition in Yekaterinburg, Russia on July 8-11, which this year had robotics technology and digitalisation as the main theme. The agreement was signed by Alexander Galkin, chief engineer of Region 42, Piotr Parkhomchik, general director of Belaz and Dmitry Vladimirov, general director of VIST Group.
This agreement aims to increase efficiency, improve operation conditions and decrease operation costs at mines. The Belaz team is currently working on the creation of new models of mining vehicles to be compliant with the latest trends of the world market. One of the projects is production of autonomous trucks - transport vehicles to be operated through GPS.
Within the framework of the signed agreement, the infrastructure for the intelligent mine will be created at a SUEK open-pit coal mine in the Kemerovo region of Russia. There will be five dump trucks with a 130t load capacity, which will be provided by Belaz, and one loader. It is planned that dump truck handling will be carried out both in robotic mode without drivers on board, but with constant control of the machine from the remote control centre, and in autonomous mode, when vehicles are controlled by the operator from the remote control centre only in emergency and special cases. The pilot project is expected to be implemented as early as the beginning of the next year.
A driverless Belaz-78250 front-end loader has been successfully tested with remote control from an operator in Yekaterinburg, approximately 2,500km away from the Belaz testing area
Parkhomchik said: "Our mining dump trucks are equipped with hundreds of sensors that generate a terabyte of information per year in real time, which allows us to track the quality of the machine anywhere in the world. The collected data, predictive analytics and machine learning technologies will enable us in the foreseeable future to provide our clients with completely new intelligent services to increase the efficiency of operation of mining dump trucks, predictive analytics and the transition to servicing, not by regulation, but on demand."
Vladimirov commented: "The creation of sites with operating robotic equipment guarantees the increase in productivity and safety of open pit mining by removing personnel from the dangerous zones, eliminating downtime related to human factors, controlling equipment in optimal modes, as well as automatically optimising freight flows in the mine and other production processes."
