Komatsu Autonomous Trucks replace Canadian drives at Mine.

News is like a year or 2 old but just say the Komatsu video below. Hundreds of off-highway mining truck drivers are replaces with autonomous trucks. Komatsu is the supplier.

Drivers made well over $100K a year. 800 drivers being replaced.

Will Suncor's driverless trucks put Alberta truck drivers out of work? - Home | Day 6 | CBC Radio

Driverless trucks could mean 'game over' for thousands of jobs - The Globe and Mail

That's probably a long time coming. The driving is more or less cyclical mindlessness. It's the guys working the face shovels and draglines that are the real skill in the material moving game.

And how many people, at what rate of compensation, will be controlling and adapting their routes?

In other words, 800 drivers at $100K each won't be replaced by 0. Maybe it's 100 factory people (fab, software, design) and 100 mine people (road management and mappers and the like - think air traffic control for the mine) - of course, people are NOT interchangeable, so the $100K driver isn't necessarily skilled for the $125K mine-traffic-control job.

And people talking about "fully autonomous" vehicles - who often seem to draw on the achievements of autopilots in aircraft - seem to miss the enourmous amount of management those autopilots require. Also, there are large software stacks involved, so by the time computer controlled vehicles are really able to 'replace a human' they may not be as much safer as people hope.

[I have long sometimes bitter experience with large software projects - they really can display very unexpected behavoirs, and really can be stalled by unexpected real world inputs.]

bryan_machine said:

of course, people are NOT interchangeable, so the $100K driver isn't necessarily skilled for the $125K mine-traffic-control job.

Click to expand...

agreed, net result though is if you expect to make 100,000 in this globally competitive environment, you have to add more value than driving a truck. Remember what happened when plasters got too expensive? Someone invented drywall.

Over ten years ago at the peak one Fort Mac mine offered a bonus of 100 K spread out over five years. The idea was that the bonus each year would be larger totaling up to 100 K if you stayed at the job driving.
As pointed out the demand for maintenance and dispatch will not disappear. Talked to a guy servicing my phone and he had a buddy who cleared 250 K in a year repairing those giants. I can understand that the labour costs will drive the mines to automation.

That's badass. The 4-wheel steering is a new concept for trucks that size I think.

Appears to be diesel electric, with an electric motor inside each wheel. Allows for precise inverter control, with regenerative braking.

Caterpillar's got some catching up to do! They've only had diesel-electrics for a few years, as most of their big truck lineup was always conventional mechanical drive.

IIRC they've been electric motor driven by onboard diesel for a while now. It's just the economics of a machine that size.

But having it automated is cool as fuck. This is really nice to see. Niches like this are great "proving grounds" for software developers. It's a bit of a microcosm that eliminates some "wild world" variables where they can isolate and perfect their product. It might yield better software and testing for the integration into over-the-road truckers. On interstates there are more variables than a mine, obviously, but less than a residential area. I think that's the next step after "closed course" vehicles like this.

Just listened to this story on the radio on the way home yesterday: Self-Driving, Automated Trucks Could Hit The Road Sooner Than Self-Driving Cars : All Tech Considered : NPR

I doubt the software is mind-blowingly groundbreaking/overly-complex. The haul roads out of big mines don't change. Only the terminus near the face changes after each new shot as the face moves back. That means the haul roads can just have a simple trail of magnets/beacons to guide the trucks. No way in hell they are replacing 800 drivers with 2-300 people. I wouldbt be at all surprised if the fleet could be controlled by 10 (or less) people in a central control room. Maintenance won't change much, though. A truck is still a truck.

Anyone wonder why the dump-bed on this and some other trucks are soo shallow and appear inefficient (space wise) relative to the height and length of the frame ? I mean compared to a road going dump-truck , the dump-body on this truck is small (relative to rest of the truck).

Now look at the Kress coal hauler , they make efficient use of space.

If we had never invented the damn wheel we could have so man jobs carrying things on our backs!

Damn inovation!

It's a neat concept, autonomous trucks would probably work better in oil sands then some of the other mining operations.
Duel steering was used on this Russian 500 ton truck.