Autonomous tramming underground has been demonstrated for years; keeping it running across multiple levels of a working mine is the harder trick. Aldersteel says its LH18 fleet has now done exactly that at a nickel operation, hauling between draw points on three levels without a continuous line of sight to a control room.
The machines navigate on lidar against a stored map of the drives, falling back to dead reckoning through short dead zones. A mesh network of Wi-Fi 6 nodes along the decline, with 5G where the mine has fibre, carries supervision traffic rather than live control.
Humans still fill the bucket
Loading remains teleoperated. Digging into a muck pile is still the task where a human reads the face better than a controller, so an operator takes over for the 40 seconds of bucket filling, then releases the machine to tram, dump, and return on its own.
Aldersteel reports a 21% increase in tonnes per operator hour and, more importantly to the mine, a reduction in the number of shifts anyone spends in the drive during blasting re-entry windows.