HIGH PROFILE
Autonomous accolades
Diederik Lugtigheid recently joined ASI Mining , the world ’ s leading OEM agnostic AHS player , as President . IM caught up with him
Q Can you give some background to your AHS experience that brought you to this point in your career ? A I worked at Rio Tinto when they were planning to deploy the first AHS in Australia at West Angelas from 2007 . Komatsu had already achieved a commercial AHS deployment at Codelco ’ s Radomiro Tomic in 2006 and were about to deploy trucks to Gaby . A team from Rio Tinto went to see the trucks at Radomiro Tomic and made a final decision to deploy the system in Australia at West Angelas , which was a project I led for several years . I already had a lot of experience with equipment OEMs but that was my first exposure to AHS . I also worked for Caterpillar rolling out its AHS at Fortescue Solomon Hub . Back in my early days of AHS exposure I had heard about ASI and Mel Torrie through a consultant who told me about one of its early mining projects with Freeport McMoRan .
Later on I was in Chile looking after product support for Komatsu in Latin America including its technology hub in Chile . I got a phone call in early 2021 from Roy Hill who wanted someone to head up their AHS introduction . They told that they weren ’ t working with Komatsu or Cat but with ASI Mining . They had chosen that route because ASI Mining ’ s AHS platform Mobius was an agnostic system and to me it really felt like a chance to work with a system that had the potential to disrupt the AHS industry and status quo . So I moved from Chile to Australia knowing that I was going to come into the project when it was still very much in its development phase . Epiroc was playing a role as well as the overall holder of the contract , for which it subcontracted the AHS to ASI Mining . Roy Hill is a private company headed up by Mrs Gina Rinehart who led a bold move to take this route with a smaller player . Mrs Rinehart wanted Roy Hill to separate fleet purchasing decisions from their desired technology stack including autonomy both initially but also in the future . All mining companies want that , but Mrs Rinehart had the vision to make happen , a different open autonomy approach that allowed us the freedom to bring together the team we needed to get the project to a successful conclusion . We worked closely with ASI Mining and Epiroc throughout 2021 and 2022 to get successfully through the validation stage when it was ready to be deployed to the wider fleet . And while I am now ASI Mining President , I continue to hold the AHS Project Director role with Roy Hill . This way I help ASI Mining expand and achieve its potential , while ensuring that the Roy Hill AHS rollout across the full fleet is successful . Roy Hill has played and continues to play an instrumental role in the development of AHS for ASI Mining and there is a very tight relationship between the two companies . Both companies are a pleasure to work with ; having spent the majority of my time at Roy Hill I can say it is the best mining company I ’ ve ever worked for with a collaborative , supportive culture where people want to go over and above in their roles .
Q What were the big challenges in the initial AHS deployment at Roy Hill , and how was it a contrast to your previous projects ? How do the main AHS differ ? A I get asked that question a lot – and I think I am in a good position to answer as I know three of the commercial mining AHS in quite a lot of detail – namely Cat , Komatsu and ASI Mining . And all of these three systems are good systems – at the end of the day a lot of it comes down to how they are deployed . If you want to do AHS well , you really need to create a very good collaborative environment . I ’ ve seen mining companies sit back and let the OEM / vendor try to do it by themselves and in these scenarios it is destined to fail . The mining company has to accept that they need to change certain aspects of the way they mine .
At Roy Hill it has been all about collaboration from the very early stages . Of course , initially everyone is really revved up about applying new technology but after some time you get some staff turnover and interest can start to fade a bit . You need stay the course and face technical challenges head on plus accept there will be some unavoidable delays . But the ASI Mining system – Mobius - is also very different from the other two – Cat Command for hauling and Komatsu FrontRunner – in that it is OEM agnostic , meaning it can be fitted to any brand or model haul truck and is a disrupting technology in the AHS market . Hence there was minimal OEM participation . They may have answered some basic questions but we really had to do all of the fine tuning and detailed engineering of the machines and how that influenced their behaviour together with ASI Mining . That meant doing a lot
of tests and having a lot of trial and error onsite
which of course takes time , and money . Making a truck move on its own or even a fleet of trucks , is relatively easy and that part of it was up and running quite fast . But you need a production
Autonomous Hitachi EH5000 equipped with ASI Mining technology at Roy Hill
proven and reliable system – so you need to get a lot of hours clocked on the trucks . First the autonomous trucks and all the other vehicles have physical hardware installed and there a lot of things in the early project phase that can go wrong or break or not work as they should – so you need to see things shake and vibrate and be exposed to the climate extremes to iron out any defects . All of the OEMs go through that on their machines so it was no different in our case . Then you have to get all the detailed mining functionalities in place including getting the all loading techniques right and getting the trucks to
spot and back up correctly as well as making sure that they can unload at the high dump , paddock dump , crusher , etc and all this at optimum speeds and safely off course . Once you get all of that done and get to ~ 80 % of manned produtctivity , then comes the hardest phase - you have to close the remaining 20 %+ productivity gap get the trucks to be more productive and safer than manned consistently in every run and every day – that ' s why they ’ ve invested in AHS in the first place . Making that happen involves a lot of work and a lot of fine tuning – squeezing seconds out of each cycle , adjusting configurations , operating conditions , the machine design , the system design and the software code . Roy Hill really gave me and ASI Mining the time we needed to do that . Roy Hill is a big mine and deploying AHS means wiring this AHS into the core of its production system – the decision at the end to convert close to 100 trucks was a big decision for Roy Hill and they would not have done that without the results that were achieved and without the confidence . During 2022 we saw huge improvements and we met the targets set by the mine .
It ’ s worth pointing out that both Komatsu and Caterpillar back in the 2000s had a lot more time to get their systems right both before and after their first big deployments . Not only were we not a truck OEM we were dealing with different models – the Hitachi EH5000 , plus several variants of the Cat 793 . And EH4000s will be next . COVID also brought its own restrictions , for
60 International Mining | MAY 2023