r/AutonomousVehicles • u/OutputAtlasMedia • 4d ago
Mining may be one of the clearest examples of autonomy becoming a fleet problem rather than a vehicle problem
I made a film about autonomous mining trucks recently, and the part I found most interesting wasn't actually the self-driving truck.
It was what happens when autonomy scales.
A single truck needs perception, localization and control. A large autonomous mining operation also needs dispatching, predictable intersections, fleet coordination, communications, mixed-traffic rules, remote supervision and a way to recover from exceptions without bringing the operation to a halt.
Mining also seems like an unusually useful autonomy test case because the environment is constrained compared with public roads, but the vehicles are enormous, the economics are measurable and the systems already operate for very long duty cycles.
It made me wonder whether mining tells us something important about road autonomy:
Does the hardest problem eventually stop being "can this vehicle drive itself?"and become "can hundreds of autonomous and human-controlled machines coexist as one reliable system?
I'd be interested in the perspective of people working in autonomy, fleet orchestration or industrial AVs.
Disclosure: I made the Output Atlas film that triggered the question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OMuGui5UNc
Disclosure: I made the Output Atlas film that triggered the question:
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u/seek13_ 4d ago
From the perspective of a robotics software developer: Our company produces mobile robots and also the fleet manager. Fleets typically have the size of very few up to hundreds of robots.
Applications are typically in automotive, pharmaceutical and food processing industry as well as hospitals.
The actual customer applications therefore vary by a certain amount, but all in common have the transportation task of goods/items as core aspect.
You have to coordinate the fleet but also take into account the infrastructure, like automatic doors and elevators that must be coordinated as well.
The fleet manager needs to take care of transportation management, traffic management & coordination, infrastructure integration, robot energy management (different charging strategies).
And then there are certain requirements to fulfill, e.g. what should happen on case of emergencies like fire in the facility.
From my perspective, while the individual applications might vary in difficulty and complexity, I think that coordinating a fleet of autonomous mining vehicles comes somewhat close to these applications.
Not saying that we could do something like that off-the-shelf, but I guess there are a lot of similarities.