IM 2022 September 22 | Page 75

Visit us ! bauma , Munich , Germany October 24 – 30 , 2022 Hall B2 , Stand 413 route or a human can remote into the vehicle to immediately assess the situation .
One of the welcome side effects of autonomy is the digitisation of information from the vehicle . It creates new data streams that are invaluable to fleet operators . The vehicle ’ s speed , location , fuel level , diagnostic status , distance to target etc . can all be relayed via the vehicle management toolset . Data analytics can process this information to assist with operational decisions , fleet maintenance scheduling and procurement and route planning .
ABD Solutions is a member of the AB Dynamics Group and says it will benefit from its knowledge of developing and supplying thousands of driving robots to the world ’ s leading vehicle manufacturers , proving grounds and regulatory authorities . The Group has decades of experience in vehicle autonomy and simulation .
“ AB Dynamics has been automating vehicles in one way or another for development and test purposes for decades ,” continues Price . “ Now , through ABD Solutions and the development of Indigo Drive , the mining industry can take advantage of this expertise to automate their existing fleets today .”
Knowing what you don ’ t know
One of the newest entrants to the mining autonomous haulage space is Pronto , which many in the industry first encountered at MINExpo 2021 . Having cut its teeth in state of the art on-road autonomous driving , the San Francisco-based company has approached mining AHS from a new point of view with its A2B solution .
Ognen Stojanovski , COO & Co-Founder , who before Pronto helped launch Otto and Uber Freight , both of which focused on developing technology for the trucking industry , told IM : “ We didn ’ t start off looking to build a mining or even an off-road autonomy system . Much of our leadership team has been closely involved with on-road autonomous vehicles for some time – almost 20 years in fact – making a lot of breakthroughs with new technologies . We started out with some advanced driver assist solutions for on-road trucks and we had a customer with a commercial trucking fleet but which also had some material haulage contracts in mines and wanted to use the same tech in what was a much more controlled environment and not only that , use it to its fully autonomous capability . The more we learned about mining , the better fit we saw it having with our technology .”
Stojanovski said the Pronto team initially assumed from what they had seen the large OEMs doing that autonomous mining was already solved , “ but we quickly realised it was hardware heavy and essentially restricted to ultraclass truck primary haulage and that our software and AI heavy approach could offer a much more general autonomy for mining , able to handle a much greater range of mining environments with a lot fewer sensors , much lower costs and much less operational restrictions . We seriously started looking at mining in late 2019 and by October 2020 we were already running loads unmanned in quarries .”
Today Pronto has already deployed not just for R & D and trials – vehicles equipped with its system are hauling ore in daily production and it believes

SOME THINK THAT RAW MATERIALS TRANSPORT REQUIRES TRUCKING . WE THINK DIFFERENT .

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