EACON Advances Autonomous Mining Trial In Australia With AI Milestone

Dubai (PlantAndEquipment.com) - EACON has started commissioning six autonomous Komatsu haul trucks at Norton Gold Fields’ Havana Pit in Western Australia, in the first step towards full production testing.

The converted trucks are currently running autonomous load-haul-dump cycles in the operating gold mine, showing the move from controlled testing to real-world mining operations. The project aims to test autonomous performance in actual production situations, where haul trucks, light vehicles and workers are working concurrently under changing site circumstances.

EACON has also reached a further milestone, achieving the number one worldwide rating on both the Interaction Prediction and Motion Prediction leaderboards of the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD), one of the industry’s main standards for autonomous driving systems.

The benchmark measures the capacity of an autonomous system to forecast the future motion and interactions of cars, equipment, and humans across an eight second horizon after viewing the first second of preceding motion, a skill deemed essential for safe autonomous operation.

EACON stated the same predictive technology is being implemented in mining areas, allowing autonomous haul trucks to safely negotiate complicated circumstances such as junctions, narrow haul roads and dynamic operating conditions.