All Articles

A modern mobile robot is basically a data center on wheels — with none of the supporting infrastructure. Polymath Robotics' CTO breaks down the networking gap holding back fleet-scale autonomy, from cameras that all ship with the same IP address to the field-replacement workflows that mining conditions demand.

The on-road AV industry has spent over a decade developing safety frameworks across more than 200 million autonomous miles. Three of them — Operational Design Domains, structured safety cases, and transparent crash reporting — are ready for mining to adopt. The validation problem on a mine site is more tractable than on public roads, but only if the industry imposes the same rigour.

What separates a machine that completes a cycle from a system that runs a shift? A practitioner's commissioning framework: a hard safety floor and an iterative production track. The site is the test system — commission it like you mean it.

Large-scale autonomous haulage has been proven in greenfield operations — but most mines aren't greenfield. They're brownfield sites with mixed fleets, legacy infrastructure, and active production. This piece examines the three core challenges of deploying autonomy in these complex environments, and the architectural approaches making it work at scale.

A clear breakdown of modular vs end-to-end autonomy for mining. Learn why modular stacks—using ML where it helps and physics-based verification where it matters—can improve safety, debugging, and interoperability.

Mining's autonomy market is consolidating, but consolidation and closed stack are not the same thing. One is a market dynamic; the other is an architecture. This editorial unpacks what that distinction means for operators evaluating vendors, technology providers assessing their durability, and OEMs building open partner ecosystems.

ConExpo 2026 made one thing clear: the mining industry is no longer debating autonomy in the abstract. It is making visible architectural choices that will shape interoperability, data ownership, vendor dependency, and long-term flexibility. This piece breaks down three emerging models — integrated ecosystem, open platform, and human-in-the-loop middle ground — and what they mean for operators making decisions in 2026 and beyond.

Autonomous haul trucks depend on centimeter-accurate GNSS positioning — but mine environments routinely degrade that signal. This article explores how INS-based sensor fusion and open, interoperable positioning architecture keep fleets moving.

A centimetre-level positioning error doesn't announce itself. In open-architecture autonomous operations, the fix isn't better GNSS hardware — it's treating corrections delivery, provisioning, datum, and telemetry as infrastructure with explicit design decisions applied consistently across every device on the network.

What really carries over from robotaxis and agriculture to mining? A practical look at motion planning—and how ISO 23725, open interfaces, and a modular stack let mines pair ML‑driven perception with classical planners to scale autonomy without lock‑in.

Guangna’s five‑party agreement signals a shift from one‑off autonomy pilots to infrastructure‑anchored programs. Battery‑swap energy systems and mine‑wide digital integration move autonomy from product to system — and raise new questions about openness, governance, and long‑run optionality.

Vale plans to expand its autonomous fleet from 32 to 150 trucks in two years using Caterpillar's system across mixed fleets. The move validates OEM-agnostic economics - but it's not open autonomy. The vendor lock-in remains identical.