WORLD PROSPECTS
The statement said:“ The Lake Bridgeport fleet represents a technological breakthrough for the industry: the seamless simultaneous operation of disparate equipment brands on a single autonomous haulage system. The fleet includes Caterpillar 775G rigid frame trucks alongside Komatsu HD605-8 and next-generation Komatsu HD605-10 trucks.”
Anthony Levandowski, CEO of Pronto, added:“ We have unlocked the ability for Heidelberg Materials to optimise their fleet
strategy independent of their AHS platform.”
Scott Tipping, Heidelberg Materials, Global Director Competence Center Aggregates & Asphalt, said:“ Our partnership with Pronto not only contributes to enhancing efficiency and safety at our sites, but it also helps us address recruiting challenges while further accelerating our sustainability efforts. Building on this achievement, we will continue to expand autonomous haulage to more than a dozen sites in North America, Europe and APAC, further advancing the digitisation of the building materials industry.”
The Lake Bridgeport deployment leverages Pronto’ s proprietary vision-only based AHS option, which uses cameras and AI to navigate dynamic quarry environments without the need for LiDAR, radar, or rigid pre-mapping.
Cited operational highlights include dynamic zone management, where the trucks autonomously adapt to changing loading and dumping points without engineering intervention. A comprehensive safety system utilising lightweight‘ Rover’ transponders ensures safe coordination between autonomous haulers and manned vehicles and equipment. Finally, the optimised driving patterns of the autonomous fleet are reducing fuel consumption and extending tyre life, directly contributing to Heidelberg Materials’ sustainability commitments.
The success at Lake Bridgeport serves as the operational foundation for the global agreement announced by the companies
10 in February 2025. With the technology validated at production scale, Heidelberg Materials and Pronto are proceeding with the rollout of Pronto AHS to over 100 trucks across operations worldwide.
Christian Kurasek, Pronto CFO, highlighted the mixed fleet element of the announcement when speaking to IM:“ It is very significant that we have an OEM agnostic platform – as that is exactly what the market wants and needs today. This is actually the first mixed fleet to go into
production in North America, which is huge. Nobody wants vendor lock-in and we’ ve proven that this system works at scale.”
Kurasek also emphasised two other important aspects to the project:“ First, I would highlight the speed at which we deployed this. Other projects have taken years to reach 1 Mt – we managed to hit 2 Mt in less than eight months. The speed at which the system can be deployed is absolutely by design – as we made it easy to use and rapidly deployable.”
A third aspect he highlighted is the cost, which he said was an order of magnitude less than traditional full stack systems.
He added:“ I think the takeaway for any big mining company as regards to Pronto AHS is that there are now other options out there that work beyond the legacy vendor lock-in options, and ours has been stress tested in production and at scale. That gives them flexibility in terms of fleet composition, plus the ability to move fast without having to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars autonomy has historically cost to deploy.” This site uses a vision-only based system – one concern in mining has been that certain conditions, especially in 24 / 7 operations in challenging climates, will require a multi sensor approach. Kurasek explained:“ Our vision-only system is safe and is great for the applications where it’ s appropriate. But we also absolutely acknowledge and hear our customers that there are operational demands and requirements at sites – in both mining and quarrying – where adding LiDAR and radar makes sense. Such as if you’ re needing to operate in foggy conditions or you are wanting higher top speeds at night. Plus, bigger mining machines like ultraclass haul trucks just have more blind spots. So, for safety reasons you’ re going to need more sensors on bigger machines.
“ So, yes, there’ s absolutely scenarios and applications where additional sensors will be needed. That was the main driver behind acquiring SafeAI. We were already working on integrating LiDAR and radar to our system and the SafeAI acquisition has just helped us accelerate that.
“ I can say that we already have a full camera, LiDAR and radar deployment that’ s operating today, and we’ ll be announcing more about that project and the different AHS options we will be offering in the very near future – watch this space.”
Across the AHS industry, there has been a focus on moving towards more on-board computing power and AI on trucks to avoid time consuming redrawing of auto haulage routes following obstacle-related stoppages, with Kurasek pointing out that Pronto has been doing that from the outset; especially in relation to smart cameras and AI-based decisions on board. Its system already dynamically routes, whereas others are just trying to add this capability today.
“ You can’ t have a human redrawing every route and making decisions every time a truck is trying to spot to get loaded or encounters a large boulder or stationary light vehicle. So, it has to be dynamic – but it also has to operate in low connectivity or GNSS-denied areas because that’ s just the reality of mining environments. Putting all the edge computing power on the truck really helps with that – as we minimise the amount of bandwidth needed and we can deal with extended periods of loss of connectivity because the trucks are making those decisions already. It’ s physically not possible to stream massive amounts of AHS data when you’ ve got 100 trucks running in a pit, as you will quickly overwhelm whatever network you’ re on.”
He adds:“ Pronto’ s minimum network bandwidth requirement is less than five megabits per second, but we can get away with significantly lower than that. We’ re working on bringing it down even further. We’ re also working on extending our ability to deal with extended comms outages or GNSS denied periods.”
The relationship with Heidelberg is evolving to include more of their sites – but what about other trials and customers in mining? Kurasek answered:“ In the mining market, we’ ve … got multiple projects underway with top ten mining companies across three continents.” www. pronto. ai
International Mining | FEBRUARY 2026