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As you know, Ariat is the official Dirt Talk podcast sponsor and at this point we've talked plenty about their footwear, their workwear. But now it is winter and boy is it cold. It was 17 degrees this morning. I had to warm the truck up. But just because it's cold does not mean the work stops. So to get the job done, you need the best, warmest workwear possible. And Ariat has a long list of outerwear, amazing jackets, pants and other goods available now. You can shop at their website ariat.com Dirttalk that is ariat.com DirttALK hello everybody. Welcome back Monday edition of the Dirt Talk podcast. I am excited about this one. Before we get into it, as always, thank you for listening and submitting your comments to dirttalkillwood.com feel free to share the podcast if you find it valuable. It is extremely, extremely helpful for us. This episode specifically is about autonomous trucks and how they work. I have been fortunate enough to see these systems pretty closely over the past few years. I have been able to ask many questions and somewhat wrap my mind around them. And I thought it was worth doing a deep dive into them and how they work because it's a very misunderstood technology, but becoming much more common and actually just spectacular in every stretch of the imagination. So to get into it, when people think of autonomous vehicles, they typically think Teslas or Google cars or whatever you see driving around town. But funny enough, the autonomous vehicles with the most mileage are not cars but enormous mining trucks. And that is everything we are here to talk about today. Caterpillar began developing autonomous mining trucks in the 1990s at its Tucson proving ground in Southern Arizona. And the other major OEM truck manufacturer, Komatsu, also began development around the same time. And fun fact, their proving grounds are almost next to each other. You could almost throw a rock from Komatsu to Caterpillar, which is quite fun. After testing internally, the OEMs then rolled out the new technology to Western Australia and later South America in the 2000s. And they chose these regions because of the very dry weather and consistent year round conditions. Autonomy loves consistency. So in Chile you have the hard rock mines, that's primarily copper, very little rain, especially in the Atacama region, almost no rain at all in like hundreds of years in the Atacama region and then Western Australia, iron ore mining, really nice road conditions. So if you can keep road conditions consistent, you can more easily automate trucks. So that's where they started. Took my jacket off, I'm already getting warmed up because I'm just getting so fired up about autonomous trucks. Then in later years they expanded to trickier applications like the Canadian oil sands, where I first saw the technology in action. I will get to that in a moment. With decades of practice, Caterpillar has well over 500 autonomous trucks deployed worldwide, with 325 million kilometers, which is about 200 million miles driven and 9 billion tons hauled autonomously, which is absolutely insane. Komatsu has over 750 autonomous trucks deployed worldwide which have moved over 10 billion tons of earth autonomously. They also have 10 trucks with over 100,000 autonomous hours each. And if you ask either brand which is the best, they will both of course say if they work a Caterpillar. Caterpillar if they work Komatsu. Komatsu and I've seen both. Fortunately, the two autonomous systems are slightly different, with Caterpillars called Mindstar and Komatsu's called Frontrunner. But the goal is identical. Autonomously haul dirt and rock at the world's largest mining operations. So why? Why go autonomous? That's a big question. What is the point of doing this? And most people on the Internet quickly go to replacing jobs. But the reality is that mining companies with the most autonomy employ more people than they ever have. So jobs are not lost. Overall, if you look at it on the numbers, this does not replace jobs. In total, the real reason here is economics, which is like any other innovation in human history. It all comes down to money. That's what makes the world go round. There is a safety benefit. Most accidents on mine sites occur with trucks. So if you remove human error and exhaustion from hauling, you in theory have less accidents. But the meat and potatoes comes down to hours. Autonomous trucks are not more efficient. Humans still load them and they drive at the same speeds they typically operate at. The major difference is the hours they could haul in a given day. Manned trucks are typically 17 to 18 hours a day because of shift change and brakes for the operators. However, autonomous trucks never have to pee or stop, meaning they can haul 22 plus hours every 20 hours, 24 hour period. That's a massive increase multiplied by a fleet of trucks over the years. The additional money that mining companies can make over time can then be reinvested in new equipment and operations in general. And in theory, everybody becomes better off. There is also a significant cost savings in fuel burn and wear overall. Humans introduce variability, but autonomous systems even everything out, allowing maintenance to be more predictable and ultimately lowering overall operating costs. So the autonomous systems run the truck exactly how the manufacturer intends them to be. Run. While you have differences between manned operations and drivers, depending on their experience, depending on night or daytime, whatever it is. There's a lot of variables. But autonomous trucks drive the exact same every single time. The first time I saw this technology was with Suncor in Alberta at their oil sand mining operations. Their fleet There consisted of 300 and 400 ton autonomous Komatsu trucks. It was absolutely spectacular to see. We were in a little. A short bus, like a school bus. We drive out, I remember we get onto the haul road. The autonomous trucks stop as we get out onto the hall road. Then the driver was able to hit a button, release the trucks. And all of the trucks driving around us had no operator in them. So if you didn't tell me that they were autonomous, I probably wouldn't have noticed. They look almost identical to traditional trucks. And you have to look really carefully because the cab is so small in these 400 ton trucks, you have to look really carefully to notice there's nobody in the cab. And it's a little spooky at first when you realize no one's in the cab. But the guy that was taking us around gave us some demonstrations on how the trucks operate. And once you start to understand the technology, you start to become more comfortable with the autonomous trucks than manned trucks, because the autonomous trucks are entirely, entirely predictable. One funny story was that they had this one point in the hall road where the trucks kept stopping at one point and they couldn't figure out why. They would walk over and nothing's there. So then they would release the trucks again. And finally they walked around enough to notice within the haul road there was a yogurt lid that had escaped somehow from one of the manned pickup trucks or machines, blades, whatever it is, because there's still manned equipment within the autonomous area. Because this yogurt lid had landed on the haul road, the autonomous system was picking it up as an obstacle and would stop the trucks. That's how precise these things are. And it was amazing too, because we were at the same mine. One mine was man trucks. One part of the mine was man trucks. The other part of the mine was autonomous. You can't necessarily mix the two all that well. And the haul roads on the autonomous mine had to be way better because again, even with oil sand, you need firm, consistent haul roads for the autonomy to work really well. And I thought that was a very interesting difference. But the unfortunate thing about this visit was that we couldn't really see how the technology worked because we didn't have the correct permissions and access. However. However, on our latest trip to Australia, we saw Caterpillar's MindStart system up close in Queensland and Western Australia. So to walk through the nuts and bolts of it all, everything starts with the command center. Sometimes this is on site and sometimes it's a thousand miles away. Either way, within the command center, there are two primary roles. Controllers and builders. Controllers communicate constantly with the human operators and managers within the pit and monitor the condition of the trucks. Think of them as air traffic controllers. They ensure everything within the pit is running as it should be. The second role at the command center is the builders, who work non stop to model the mine for the computer system. As mines are always changing, they constantly build new dump areas, roads and obstacles. They leverage data from surveyors on the ground, drone topos from the air, and the truck's data itself. Their goal is to keep it real. So whatever is in the mine is in the computer model. You want to keep it real at all times, and you have to have those builders building it ahead of the trucks to keep it as real as possible. As you can imagine, all of this requires a really serious network. So dedicated 5G installations are among the first things in the mine development process. Ironically, the best cell service I had in Australia was in the middle of nowhere at the mines we visited. It's also worth noting that the best autonomous operations are designed to be autonomous from the beginning. You can retrofit an existing operation, but it's a little bit more difficult, a little less efficient. So ideally, you can design your mine plan around autonomy when you begin, but that's quite rare nowadays. So to get now further into the weeds, an autonomous mine area is also called an aoz, an autonomous operating zone. The reason why mines have more autonomous experience is because they're controlled environments. The mine can build a barrier around the AOZ and control everybody in or out. Autonomous vehicles in city settings have to contend with many more variables, so they are, in theory, much more difficult to create. Every light vehicle then entering the AOZ has to badge in and receive the OK from the controllers. Each vehicle also has GPS and antennas to communicate with the command center and the trucks, so the autonomous units know where any manned units are. Every other manned machine, like water carts, blades and dozers, has the same system, so the trucks know where every manned machine is at all times. Within the manned vehicles, a computer display shows the operation in real time. As the vehicle navigates the mine site, the driver can monitor the display to understand where trucks are going. At any given time, the trucks always have the right of way. So the driver aims to let trucks turn as scheduled on the screen that they're looking at. The lanes are different colors which the builders have created to indicate the haul roads. Blue indicates a truck is approaching, Green indicates the lane is clear and available for trucks to use, and yellow indicates a truck is scheduled to eventually cruise the lane. The truck lanes end roughly where the dig units are. From there, the operators set their spot points by positioning their bucket where they will want the next truck and hitting a button on the joystick. The trucks will then back in within an inch every single time, so the operator can't bitch about the truckees backing in at the wrong or right spot. Once loaded, they hit another button which kicks the truck out, and the truck then heads to the dump. Once at the dump, the trucks will rotate through dump points, which the builders have predetermined. The trucks constantly optimize themselves as the operation builds a larger. The trucks constantly optimize themselves as the operation builds a larger data set. And given the day's conditions. For example, in iron ore, the plant needs various ore grades throughout a shift. Because the system knows which shovels are in which ore grade, it can automatically staff up the shovels with the right ore grade with more trucks. Theoretically, the longer an operation runs, the better it gets. These trucks are so good that they've had to program the trucks to run slightly random routes on haul roads so they don't wear enormous ruts from driving in the same lane, which is just a bananas fact. The control center can also rotate trucks automatically through the shop for preventative maintenance. The trucks will drive themselves to a staging area, and then fitters will take over and run them normally from the same cab that traditional trucks have. Before they approach, they can confirm that the truck has been switched to manual mode for safety reasons. Mines will also stagger shift changes for the loading units, Allowing the trucks to never stop working. Trucks can even continue working during some blasting, as they can operate in places where humans can't. The cat systems have three main components to run the trucks autonomously. First, they have GPS hanging off the front of the truck, which provides positioning within a quarter inch. Then there's radar on the front bumper for obstacle detection and safety. If I were to walk in front of the truck without any notice, the truck would spot me and stop within a truck's length, even while fully loaded. Finally, a lidar system uses lasers to constantly measure the distances to surrounding objects, creating a 3D scan of the truck's surroundings. When we visited one of the Operations, we watched a large rock roll out of the tray of the previous loaded truck as it off from the excavator. The next truck's lidar spotted the obstacle, stopped the truck and called the dozer operator. Once cleared, the dozer operator called back to the command center to confirm the area was clear. And then the command center released the truck to continue as planned, which was so, so fun to watch in real time. For safety. People also carry E stops which can shut the entire operation down at the press of a button. Reportedly, when I asked about the only issues, they typically said the issues arise when humans get involved. Cause again, variety is the enemy. And when I put this stuff on the Internet, like I previously mentioned, the comments are wildly negative, but they're always wildly negative from people that have never worked around autonomous trucks. And so to do my homework, I always ask people that have worked around autonomous trucks what they think of the autonomy. And for the most part, everybody is wildly positive, which was to me surprising because everything online was so negative. Driving a truck is really harsh. And so with those automated, it allows people even starting out to focus on more dynamic tasks and get a shot at a dozer, a blade, an excavator, whatever. It is faster than they would otherwise, which I think is good news for everybody. And before we wrap up here, one more note. While in Chile, I was talking with Caterpillar there and they said autonomy is the only way to make electric trucks sustainable long term. Because autonomy allows all of the trucks to know where all of the trucks are at any given time, over even the next 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 24 hours. And since the trucks know where all of each other trucks will be in, in a, in a future, at a future state, the trucks can then optimize themselves for charging and for their battery levels to ensure all the trucks have the right charge as the batteries are being used while they haul. Which is quite interesting. We'll see how that goes. It has not been done on any kind of significant scale, but Fortescue and Lieber said they're gonna do it better and bigger than anybody. So we'll see how it goes for them. But those battery trucks that they ordered are autonomous. Cause again, the only way to do it is through autonomy. So that is my best explanation on how autonomous trucks work. That is probably the best explanation anywhere. I have not seen it clearly explained anywhere. The manufacturer websites are a little obscure. I thought I would try to put it into the simplest form possible. And all of this is stated with multiple sites, four sites now visited that are autonomous on three continents, which is pretty good. So I am by no means an autonomous expert, but I have seen it and hopefully explained it for you all in a very simple level. So thank you again for listening. If you want to support what we're doing, you can go to dirtworldstore.com to check out our stickers, calendars, hats, shirts. We've got a ton of stuff on there. And we will see you on the next episode. Stay dirty, everybody.