Towards the automated mine

The mining of minerals must surely be the most demanding, dirty and dangerous job in the history of human industry. That’s not to take away from the millions of workers who have toiled for the good of civilization. But if ever there’s justification for full automation, it must be mining.

Indeed that’s the goal that many of the big mining players are now racing towards. In truth, the industry has been very slowly heading that way for decades. Most mines are pretty desolate of humans, with vast sites criss-crossed by trucks.

In the not-to-distant future though, the sites could be run entirely by control centres thousands of kilometres away.

‘The mining industry is working towards autonomous and remote operations to achieve productivity gains and safety improvements. This requires all systems and applications to be integrated to strengthen and improve work process so that the complete value chain from the mine to the market is controlled in the most optimal way,’ said Ricardo Hirschbruch,  a process automation region division manager with ABB – a company that has been involved with mining automation since 1985.