SURFACE DRILLING
Paul Moore caught up with Mason Biernat , Cat MineStar Solutions Drilling Specialist on its approach to autonomy in mining
Q Is the current automation program focused on the MD6250 or is it now ‘ available ’ across all models ? A The current Cat ® MineStar™ Command for drilling system is deployable on the MD6250 , MD6310 and MD6640 Cat drill models . Caterpillar ’ s vision is to have all Cat drill models leave the factory with a level of automation following the example set forth by the MD6250 , MD6310 and MD6640s today .
Q The truck autonomy market has evolved from “ new ” autonomous trucks to also including a sizeable retrofit market – is Caterpillar offering solutions for both new and older already working drills ? A Caterpillar has a focus on interoperability for drills . Caterpillar currently has a fleet of retrofit large electric blast hole drills running under Command for drilling in the field today . The drills are made up of a fleet of legacy Bucyrus 49R and 49HR drills , which are known as Cat MD6640s today , and P & H 320 XPC ’ s and P & H 120As . The Caterpillar advantage is having a closely integrated technology solution on a Cat machine , but we are also trying to deliver the benefits of autonomous drilling and technology to customers who may not own a Cat drill or own a mixed fleet of drill models .
Q Does the system require MineStar to be in place to be used or can it work with other systems ? A MineStar is a digital ecosystem that is made up of Health , Fleet , Detect , Terrain and Command , where Command leverages multiple
Cat autonomous MD6250 at Mt Arthur coal mine in Australia
aspects of the MineStar ecosystem . MineStar Command for drilling system requires MineStar Terrain , deployed on multiple drill OEM ’ s , to be deployed at site . The Command system was designed in a building block approach to allow sites to implement drilling technologies at their own pace . The first block in the autonomy journey is having base drill automation features such as Auto-Drill , Auto-Level and Auto-Mast allowing the operator to start automating the drilling cycle one button at a time . The next layer is Terrain for drilling , a high precision guidance technology enabling operators to drill holes in the exact location and to the exact elevation specified by the plan , resulting in smoother , safer and more efficient blasting . Terrain empowers mine sites to better utilise the data coming from their drill operations whether it be production and performance information or specific geology profiling information from Strata Recognition . The next building blocks have a varying level of autonomy depending on the problem trying to be solved at site . Command for drilling offers autonomy where the operator remains in the cab and monitors autonomous drilling progress while MineStar takes over as the operator all the way to solutions where the operator is offboard the machine monitoring autonomous progress from a tablet device or from a Remote Operations Centre . All of the additional information introduced with autonomy is still managed through MineStar Terrain thus reducing the training and change management requirements of existing Terrain users .
Q Is there still demand for teleremote solutions at some sites or do you think most will opt to go straight to autonomous ? A Certain application use cases may always require some level of a tele-remote solution , like the Cat Remote Operator Station , whether the use case is to drill 100 % tele-remote or to use tele-remote in conjunction with an autonomous drill . Tele-remote removes operators from potentially harmful situations and environments and a requirement for safer drilling operations will always be present in the mining industry . The drilling environment is very volatile and sudden unexpected changes in geology are commonly encountered while drilling . Even minute changes in geology can cause down-hole exceptions that are challenging for an autonomous solution to manage without the occasional remote operator intervention . As automation and autonomy evolve and become more intelligent the need to completely control a drill teleremotely as an operator decreases . as well as in Australia on both Pit Viper-235 and Pit Viper-275 rigs . This has mainly been in coal – showing the potential of automation beyond metallic hard rock in coal which is lower margin and higher speed .
Looking at relative progress in terms automation over time – Epiroc recently did a study on how continual rollout of this technology since 2014 has related to fuel burn , fuel per metre and what were the effects on productivity . Berens says the effect has almost been like compound interest – or as business strategy advisor Jim Collins says in relation to innovation , it is like continually building momentum on a flywheel . As an example Pit Viper drill automation between 2014 and 2016 added an average 19 % extra production , another 7 % by 2018 and another 15 % by 2020 , totalling
41 %. RCS 5 is predicted to add another 12 % between 2020 and 2022 . Incremental fuel burn per drill over the same period on average totalled 18 %. Overall , Berens said that automation since 2014 has now added the work of a single non-autonomous drill for every four autonomous drills .
Are the benefits greater for “ new ” auto drills versus retrofits ? “ The reality is that retrofits have to be part of any drill automation strategy to give customers maximum value from existing fleets . Going to RCS 5 is not intrusive and is more focused on the control system rather than any hardware apart from some processor and graphics changes . On the drill , changes are mainly in the cab apart from adding an absolute encoder on the drill head to get much more accurate depth measurement . But overall the retrofit versus new auto drill tide is changing . Pretty much all of the users that started with retrofits are now coming back to us and ordering new drills .”
Agile development has also become the cornerstone of the Epiroc Pit Viper automation program – instead of doing everything in-house first and rolling out new products for the field , changes are introduced and tweaked in real applications allowing for less risk and better product evolution with customer buy-in .
Is autonomous drilling also moving beyond just the Tier 1 miners and contractors and the largest pits to smaller mines and contractors ? “ We are already working with a few big contractors who like their mining customers already know how to utilise drill automation to its fullest potential . Others are still trying to find
24 International Mining | APRIL 2021