One of the pioneers of remotely operated mining technology is Canadian company HARD-LINE. Brian Larocque, HARD-LINE’s general manager in Chile, explained the transition from line of site control (an operator standing in front of the equipment watching it work from a safe distance) to teleoperation.
He gave the example of autonomous blasting at a sublevel stoping operation as an illustration of how productivity can be increased: “Autonomous operations allow for much less down time as usually after a blast you will not be able to send anyone into the mine for two hours, but now the autonomous equipment can be operating.”
For the open-pit market, Larocque discussed HARD-LINE’s partnership with Hexagon to develop autonomous situations such as collision avoidance, GPS and drilling patterns: “We marry Hexagon’s systems with HARD-LINE’s systems and based on the combined technologies the equipment can move from teleoperation to semi-autonomous operation to fully autonomous operation.”