Duo team up to advance autonomous mining

The mining industry has been an early adopter of fully autonomous vehicles and machinery in order to improve safety, increase productivity, and save costs. The application of an autonomous haulage system solution will not only protect mining workers, but also greatly improve the overall economic benefit of mining enterprises.

“The open-pit mining industry has massive potential around the globe, and this collaboration brings together best-in-class technology and expertise that is paving the way for next-generation mining vehicles,” said Huang Liming, Chief Technology Officer of TAGE. “We are pleased to have proven software from Wind River that is embedded in billions of devices and systems serving as the trusted core software foundation for the development of our autonomous solution.”

TAGE has developed an autonomous haulage system solution based on an edge to cloud architecture, including an intelligent cloud platform, V2X telematics, and intelligent autonomous mining vehicle.

Specifically, the software platform powering this solution includes the Wind River VxWorks Real Time Operating System (RTOS), along with TAGE’s Central Control Unit (CCU) core algorithm module. It delivers an autonomous haulage system platform with the highest levels of security, safety, reliability, and performance.

The CCU in the autonomous vehicle domain controller is responsible for the implementation of core functions of autonomous mining vehicles, such as motion planning, vehicle control, and fault diagnosis. These functions have stringent requirements around the security, safety, and reliability of a system’s operation, as well as for real-time performance and deterministic task execution and switching, which Wind River software delivers.

“As the autonomous world becomes more and more of a reality, the design, development, and deployment of mission-critical systems will only increase in importance, especially when we have the opportunity to drastically increase the safety of mining workers,” said Gareth Noyes, Senior Vice President, Products at Wind River. “Together with TAGE, we are delivering a safe, secure, and reliable software foundation for autonomous mining vehicles that will significantly advance the innovation and development in this market.”

Wind River and TAGE will also work closely on development environments and functional safety certifications to launch practical products and solutions. In addition, given the increasing compute demands of autonomous vehicles, the two companies will develop infrastructure software for next-generation mine vehicles, including advanced high performance computing, V2X between vehicles and the infrastructure, and secure Over-The-Air (OTA) update technologies.

Photo credit: TAGE.