Breaking New Ground in Autonomous Mining

With the rapid technological development of recent years, autonomous driving advancements are bringing human society into a brand-new era of smart driving. Open-pit mines, as representative scenarios for autonomous driving technology, are also moving towards the direction of L4 autonomous haulage commercialisation. Recently, EACON, a leading provider of autonomous solutions in mining areas, has achieved another milestone breakthrough. It has realized the regular “safety personnel off the truck” at the Zhundong Open-pit Coal Mine of National Energy Group, marking the first mining company in the industry to achieve multi-vehicle regular safety personnel off the vehicle and 24/7 autonomous operation, signaling that the autonomous driving industry has entered the eve of commercialisation.

Safety-First Engineering

Safety is the primary prerequisite for unmanned operations. In order to solve the problem of safety personnel off the vehicle, the research and development team of EACON has been committed to continuously improving the safety and stability of the autonomous system and hardware. By conducting numerous tests to understand the boundary of each module’s capabilities, technical details are reverse-engineered based on the goals.

In the preliminary stage, the Zhundong Open-pit Coal Mine of National Energy Group and EACON worked together to identify potential risks in the operation scenarios and production processes of autonomous driving, analysing five major categories including transportation roads, loading and unloading areas, vehicles, weather, and communication conditions, with a total of more than 500 potential risk sources. Based on this, EACON has formulated multiple safety redundancy strategies to comprehensively ensure the safe and reliable operation of autonomous driving through vehicle perception, dispatch platform, vehicle control, spot inspection, and maintenance.

A System Aligned With Global Standards

In terms of autonomous system design, EACON has referenced international specifications and standards for autonomous driving and mining machinery, such as ISO17757, ISO22737, and ISO19014, to create a set of autonomous system that integrate the dispatch command platform, single vehicle autonomous driving system, network communication system, and collaborative operation system. This system features clear functional boundaries, quantifiable evaluation of functional indicators, and strong testability, laying a solid foundation for the realisation of regular multi-vehicle operation without safety personnel.

High-Precision Performance

With the premise of ensuring mine safety production, efficiency is the ultimate goal after removing safety personnel from the vehicle. Scientific and reasonable dispatch planning, real-time and accurate perception, and precise docking are key factors to ensure efficiency. EACON ensures precise parking and operational efficiency, achieving a parking precision of less than 0.4 metres and lateral control precision of less than 0.5 metres during heavy-load downhill. Based on deep learning perception technology for mining roads and operation scenarios, EACON achieves vehicle balance rolling on roads, accurate identification of retaining walls and work surface edges, and precise recognition of 30 cm objects up to a distance of 20 metres, with real-time recognition accuracy of excavation lines accurate to 10 cm.

It is worth noting that after the regular removal of safety personnel from the vehicle at the Zhundong Open-pit Coal Mine, EACON's mining truck achieved a maximum speed of 35 km/h, and the efficiency of unmanned driving reached 80% of the efficiency of manned driving (not lower than when safety personnel are on board), realising a safer, more efficient autonomous operation. It has become the first autonomous driving company to achieve multi-vehicle regular safety personnel getting off-board in real operation.