86 Insight | UGVs And as fleet operators across countless industries are discovering, switching from crewed to uncrewed vehicles consistently reduces the use of fuel and battery energy, thanks to highresolution sensing, fine digital control, and automated traffic management to cut out all unnecessary manoeuvres. It also reduces the need for humans in hazardous mining environments or such repetitive operations, cutting medical, training and PPE costs. Hence mine operators are rapidly trialling and evaluating how small autonomous trucks (as an easier integration project and a more scalable introductory solution than large self-driving trucks) might save them fuel and parts replacement costs, not to mention yield compliance or credit benefits via emissions reductions. Such trials were seen many years back on the part of the Rio Tinto mining corporation, where Scania – among other companies – has been providing small trucks equipped with autonomous sensing and compute systems for trials in its Australian operations. More recently, the Swedish OEM has agreed with Fortescue, another Australian mining corporation, to jointlydevelop and validate a fully-integrated autonomous mining road train solution – that is, when a single autonomous truck hauls multiple trailers – with the resulting vehicle likely to be one of the heaviesthaulage AVs ever made. Scania focuses its autonomous truck development in both mining and hubto-hub logistics. For the former, Scania’s solutions are engineered to move materials from mining sites to storage or processing facilities by following predetermined routes of waypoints. Data from GNSS as well as Lidars, radars, and cameras encircling the trucks’ bodies are gathered to inform not only obstacle evasion and safety behaviours, but also a central control system. Scania’s V2X (vehicle-to-everything) antennas maintain a data link to that system, which can then make decisions for optimising routes, maintenance, and productivity. The company’s self-driving mine trucks are trialled and optimised at the Scania Demo Centre’s Gläntan circuit, located in Södertälje, Sweden. There, the systems are cycled through different routes as well as autonomous material loading and unloading operations (including automated waiting as a crewed excavator dumps material into the truck trailer). Up to 10 trucks are typically managed from the Gläntan operations centre at a time (a self-imposed safety limit, with management of more being technologically possible), with a safety driver either present or not depending on the nature of the incipient test. Summary Across these applications, one can see that the push for efficiency is growing to encompass not just individual components, but entire vehicles, their surrounding infrastructure, and the way they are manufactured. As well as more cost-effective numbers and selections of parts (especially sensors and batteries, among the most expensive single components on ground vehicles), designing for manufacture and engineering for plugand-play are becoming common practice to ensure a viable level of pricing and useability for customers. This is reflective of an industry maturing beyond one-off experimental robotics projects, towards series manufacturing. With self-driving component manufacturers now producing safetycompliant autonomy computers and by-wire systems in bulk, UGVs can increasingly be engineered – and manufactured – at lower and lower costs, to suit customers’ budgets and drive home the efficiency advantage of going autonomous. But it is also imperative that UGV manufacturers continue to make faceto-face contact with both regulators and customers on a regular basis, to ensure uncrewed vehicles on- and off-road will not only be permitted, but wanted by those across all industries who have come to understand the potential of uncrewed systems. April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Scania and Fortescue are collaborating on the development and optimisation of autonomous mining trucks (Image courtesy of Scania)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4