SURFACE DRILLING
In any discussion of blasthole drilling autonomy , it makes sense to start with Epiroc as in OEM terms it has been in the game the longest and it remains the market leader with the largest number of installed units across the greatest variety of commodities and individual customers – which in recent years have included amongst others BHP South Flank , IAMGOLD Essakane , Boliden Aitik , Antofagasta Los Pelambres , Ferrexpo Yeristovo , Kirkland Lake Gold Detour , Anglo American Los Bronces , Anglo American Quellaveco and Bowen Basin Coal ’ s Lake Vermont in Queensland , which was the first coal mine to have two multi-pass fully autonomous drill rigs working side-by-side and are also notable in being operated by contractor Thiess . South Flank as a project shows the potential of the system – operated from BHP ’ s IROC in Perth over 1,000 km away . At the heart of Epiroc ’ s success of course in autonomous drilling is its Rig Control System ( RCS ) command-control platform , now on its 5th iteration as RCS 5 . RCS 5 features new interfaces for operator awareness to include seeing other Pit Viper drills on the pattern and updated maintenance screens for remote and onboard support . The new Drilling Data Screen in RCS 5 features real time depth and penetration rate feedback with histogram for easy in-hole monitoring .
Tyler Berens , Epiroc Automation Director , Surface Mining told IM : “ We have run both in parallel and have just put in our last RCS 4
Making a first pass
Paul Moore spoke to the OEM market leaders on their progress with full blasthole drill automation , plus the leading third party system tech supplier . Progress is now rapid with the market having evolved well beyond just early adopters
So what exactly does the future roadmap involve if automation is already here ? The core elements like the Rod Handling System ( RHS ), Hole Navigation System ( HNS ) and Auto Positioning are already entrenched . Now it is more about the big picture . “ We see a lot of work still to do on the data front in terms of connecting the value chain with digitalisation and robotics – especially the use of AI combined with things like real time analysis of everything from the ore horizons being drilled in terms of structure and grade to machine health and the maintenance side and the fleet of drills working as a team to drill out a pattern in the most efficient way possible based on data analytics . It is driven by Epiroc ’ s
Epiroc autonomous PV-271
6th Sense concept which is broken into three layers that will connect the mine value chain – Machine Automation , covering the performance of the individual drill ; Process Automation where here we would be talking about the most efficient way possible for the team of units to conduct the drilling portion of the value chain , and finally System Integration release before the transition to solely RCS 5 . – connecting the drill space to the outside RCS 4 got us all the way to an autonomous base environment including traffic management , the that could run remote drills from a long distance explosives and blasting teams etc .” away which was quite an achievement for a
Over the past year Berens says RCS 5 has control system that began development in 2010 . been deployed in a number of projects including But ultimately a decade later we had to move to retrofits of entire drill fleets , including a foundation that could take us to where the autonomous fleets running multi-pass patterns autonomy roadmap and the customers needed using its AutoDrill 2 technology plus auto drills us to go in robotics and digitalisation supporting in metals and coal and industrial minerals as the mine ’ s value chain . Hopefully RCS 5 will be well as on electric cable tethered drills . Multipass automation is now used in South Africa able to last us another ten years .” and
Graph illustrating compound productivity gains with Epiroc Pit Viper automation . The values shown are from test partner sites so some variables that go into these outcomes are site dependent and individual site outcomes may vary
22 International Mining | APRIL 2021