MINING TRUCKS
Agile AI
Following on from an initial interview just after he joined the company as SafeAI Senior VP , IM has spoken to Sudhanshu Singh again one year on to get a feel for SafeAI ’ s ongoing successes , roadmap and differentiators
Q What have been your observations on joining SafeAI after a year ? A I have always felt that technology should be something that is easy to deploy , easy to understand , and self intuitive . But also it should be reliable and cost effective , and that is something I get a lot of feedback from mine sites . During my career with Terex , Bucyrus and Caterpillar , I had the opportunity to work at both construction and mining sites globally . These construction , quarry and mining operations today are big potential markets for autonomy but they want simplicity not complexity . To deploy autonomy comes with a lot of extras in terms of network requirement , training requirement , change management and fleet management . All this needs to be brought together and innovated in a creative way to make the process as easy as possible for the customer . When MACA was evaluating various autonomy options , they looked at all of the different players . One of their criteria was that things should be very simple and that issues should be easy to diagnose . It should also be very fast to deploy – the mining contractor business model is pretty detailed and very time sensitive . With typically 3-5 year contracts , though these are often renewed – you don ’ t have the luxury of a long payback period that owner operators have . MACA wanted an autonomy tech provider that was able and willing to do things differently . We have a very well laid out plan with defined milestones . Things are progressing very well since the initial deployment on a 181 t class Hitachi EH3500AC-3 haul truck at Capricorn Metals ’ Karlawinda . The agreement covered retrofitting a mixed fleet of 100 mining trucks across multiple locations together with Position Partners . Since the MoU was announced in March 2022 , MACA was acquired by Thiess and Position Partners was acquired by Mitsui – suffice to say that this has significantly enlarged the potential scope of the project . This was all very well suited to one of the missions of SafeAI – which was to accelerate autonomy in mining not only in the big Tier 1 mining assets , but also in the small mines and construction sites which may only have a small number of machines . SafeAI has already blown away previous concepts of how fast things could be done using its in-house creativity and innovation . To give you an example , the SafeAI Head of Engineering used to work for both Boeing and Northrop Grumman on autonomous solutions including aerial autonomous vehicles . We also have an ex-NASA employee who was involved with the Mars Rover . We have several folks with proven experience from TESLA , BHP , Rio Tinto , Caterpillar , Komatsu and Hitachi helping us develop solutions at a much faster pace . These types of talented people are at SafeAI because they are behind the mission , not just the job . SafeAI also has the luxury of having a large quarry-based proving ground near our HQ in San Jose , California . To summarise , SafeAI has a very creative , innovative and customer partnership based approach . The two customer partnerships we have with MACA and Obayashi are completely aligned with this .
Q Everyone is using similar LiDAR , radar and camera-based sensors – but with different command and control systems , computing power and AHS algorithms – what are SafeAI ’ s technology differentiators ? A SafeAI is leveraging billions of investment dollars that took place in the auto industry to deploy autonomous vehicle technology for construction and mining . The evolution of a s