SURFACE DRILLING
still use a cable for drilling and recharging of the battery. The largest version we have built is a SmartROC D65 BE Demonstrator, which is a part of what we will deliver to Fortescue.”
Allel adds:“ At first all the interest was in automation – but now there is an increasing level of interest in these crawler rig battery solutions and rotary rig hybrid solutions as well – but of course with the battery rigs, customers want to know how long it will last until the next charging opportunity, for example. Technology is improving fast – today it is possible with higher power density batteries to keep running a rig for a whole shift for example. So I would say from a crawler drill point of view, it’ s very likely that within the next five to ten years the battery option will become more significant in the market with a lot of demand – potentially working with mobile charging units in the pit – and as mentioned with Fortescue and the SmartROC D65 BE Demonstrator, this is something that customers now have begun to turn to. We just have to maximise the capabilities of the battery. On charging units, we are just launching a next‐generation charging solution for underground mining – so these will come for surface as well. We will be able to offer solutions both ourselves and working with our third party partners.” On the rotary side, Epiroc recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Pit Viper( see boxout) and it still has a dominant market share with this model – both for conventional operation and equipped with autonomy. However, the other drill OEMs – and the third party OEM agnostic autonomy players – are still tough competition. How does Allel see Epiroc maintaining its leading position going forward?“ We have the strength of our experience and installed base which means others are having to try to catch up, but at the same time we cannot stand still – we are constantly coming up with new functionalities as well as improving existing ones – to help customers increase productivity, reduce TCO and strengthen safety. This includes flexibility – including future proofing through new versions of RCS for example, the latest of which is RCS 5 – but also offering modular options like RCS Lite for other customers – allowing them to deliver greater efficiency now, along with the opportunity to enhance their equipment down the road to achieve their automation goals.” He also cited the Automatic Bit Changer – where Epiroc was first in the market – as a good example of Epiroc leading new developments.
Allel added:“ I think technology like LinkOA – our OEM agnostic autonomy system – will become much more influential as well going forward. Specifically, LinkOA for Drills enables autonomous drilling by integrating customer drill fleets into a cohesive system along with other equipment such as haul trucks, for example. Focused on improving safety and efficiency, it allows real-time control and monitoring of multiple drills across the operation.”
The system is designed to adapt to various mine setups, supporting compatibility with different OEM equipment. Its straightforward interface ensures ease of use for daily operations and long-term planning, while autonomous capabilities enhance the precision and consistency of drilling tasks.
“ We are no longer just thinking about our own Epiroc machines – we want to help customers integrate their whole mining fleet in one digital and automation environment. Especially some of the big mining customers that may have multiple operations – even if they have a main Pit Viper fleet they may also have other rotary drill brands – plus crawler contour and pre-split drills from other brands as well as Epiroc- so I think they find the potential of LinkOA very interesting.”
Pit Viper at 25
Epiroc’ s Pit Viper blasthole drill was a game changer in mining in terms of flexibility, power, efficiency and safety. The rig has now been in the market for 25 years and remains the market leader. Not only that, but for the past 10 years, they have also been running autonomously – in that decade the depth accuracy of the drilled holes has increased by an average of 85 %, leading to more than 8 million wasted overdrill metres being avoided. The spatial accuracy of the drilled holes has increased by an average of 60 %. More than 90 million metres have been drilled autonomously and the average utilisation of a Pit Viper rig in autonomous mode is 17 % higher than in manual mode. They have also had a big environmental impact as around 85 million litres of fuel have been saved, and CO 2 emissions have been reduced by around 225,000 t. Autonomous Pit Viper rigs have also enhanced safety by operating unmanned, and with the Automatic Bit Changer( ABC), safety is further elevated. Since the launch of the ABC in 2022, more than 7,000 tricone bits have been replaced automatically. To mark this major milestone, IM Editorial Director Paul Moore talked in-depth to Vice President Marketing, Epiroc Surface division, Dustin Penn, who has been involved with the Pit Viper since its inception.
One area discussed was how did the autonomy side of things evolve from the early days and what are some of the big achievements there?“ At that time, everyone was looking to autonomy’ s potential in mining across the board. With the Atlas Copco investment we were also able to leverage the experience in automation that they had and that worked for us – we didn’ t want to start from scratch, so we took what had been very successful underground with RCS to the surface and adapted it. A lot of the core applications, software and code were able to be reused. We demonstrated an early version of the full autonomous suite after MINExpo in 2008. We ran several trials at customer sites including Boliden Aitik in Sweden and Barrick Goldstrike in the US. These were running using semi autonomous line of sight with teleoperation from a van or container – and this formed the basis of the technology that later evolved to full autonomy. It put in place the required structures and robustness of the equipment which allowed us to upgrade the RCS where it became a truly smart rig. And because it was built up from the base platform, as time has gone on it has meant we can offer a lot of retrofit upgrades to drills even with 50,000 hours, bringing increased performance through our new software. Sometimes it has required both hardware and software updates, but the customer can get more value or increased value out of their existing products. What we have achieved with autonomy is remarkable – we now have hundreds of fully autonomous drills after only 10 years, having started with only a few rigs at BHP Yandi being monitored from their IROC in Perth over 1,000 kilometres away; and from the success of that it expanded across their fleet. We took the learnings from that and really tried to scale our autonomy-related resources and competence all around the around the world, using boot camps where we’ d bring people in for two weeks at a time and immerse them in our technology – not only the automation packages themselves but also demonstrating the value of the data and how to utilise that data, such as translating it into quantifiable impacts that automation is having on the operation. Pit Viper drill autonomy has now been around for long enough that some of the early fleets that we installed are now starting to turn over and customers are coming back to the to Pit Vipers because they’ ve been very successful to date plus today they are able to now enhance their existing drill or invest in a new drill with our latest features and improvements. We lifted the bar from a standard drill to an automated drill to a full pattern autonomous drill. Today full autonomy is common – we have more than 35 sites operating around the world, all with multiple machines.”
52 International Mining | MAY 2026