User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Trucks World News: AUTONOMOUS TRUCKS * Japan: Drones guide robot trucks - ** Australia: Robot trucks in Rio's Pilbara mines
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Oct 16, 2015

AUTONOMOUS TRUCKS * Japan: Drones guide robot trucks - ** Australia: Robot trucks in Rio's Pilbara mines

* Tokyo - At construction sites, vehicles that can drive themselves
(Screenshot by author, from Vimeo: Skycatch Smart Construction)

-- Japan’s Komatsu now makes construction vehicles that can drive themselves. To get the most out of these self-driving machines, Komatsu recently paired with American dronemaker Skycatch with a plan to have drones survey and map construction sites, and then have unmanned bulldozers and other vehicles go to work... First, drones fly over a construction site, taking pictures of the ground below. Software then stitches these pictures into 3D maps, and site planners add in the information about what earth they want moved, which areas they want left intact, and what the next stage of construction should look like. The machines then set about their tasks, working on the site under the watchful eye of a remote human controller/manager, instead of individual drivers. It’s an excellent use of drone mapping... Komatsu and Skycatch are calling this “Smart Construction,” but it’s as much about replacing human workers as it is about machines getting smarter..  Japan is currently building stadiums for the 2020 Olympics, and is suffering a shortage of native-born laborers for construction. There are plenty of foreign-born workers available, but Japan's tight controls on visas are inhibiting the country’s use of migrant blue-collar workers. Komatsu and Skycatch’s collaboration is as much about what technology can do as what the politics of Japan can’t: create workers the population finds acceptable, substituting machines for humans... 
Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan - Popular Science, by Kelsey D. Atherton - October 14, 2015


** West Australia - Robot trucks outperform human drivers

-- Rio Tinto says the use of automated trucks in the Pilbara is outperforming its traditional people-driven fleet by 12 per cent as it ramps up technology deployment in its iron ore business... Addressing the Nikkei Asia Review Forum in Sydney today, Rio Tinto group executive of technology and information Greg Lilleyman said its Mine of the Future program and "pioneering" collaboration with Japanese manufacturer Komatsu "had helped lead the way in our industry"... The Mine of the Future program, which had automated trucks as one of its first targets, has been extended to automated drills, drones and use of big data... Having spent $US14.7 billion over the past decade to increase its Pilbara capacity towards 360 million tonnes a year, Rio has been forced to accelerate cost cutting in the wake of an iron ore price collapse to the mid-$US50 a tonne range that has caught much of the industry on the hop... Although the like of Rio and BHP Billiton had been expecting iron ore prices to drop below $US100/t, it was the pace of the collapse that caused angst, including among shareholders... Iron ore has contributed more than half of Rio and BHP's underlying group profits... 
(Photo: Robot trucks outperform human drivers: Rio Tinto) -- Pilbara, WA, Australia - The West Australian, by Peter Klinger - October 15, 2015

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