Driving From Italy To China ... With No Driver | Hacker News Reader

Driving From Italy To China ... With No Driver

npr.org

47 pointswglb18 comments

I work on these systems in mining. With a human driver a mine car is limited to 12-20kmh with one vehicle in each 100m block for safety, on an automated level with no people present there are no limits. We can do 60km/h with vehicles only a couple of metres apart - shifting 10x as much material more cheaply and safely.

In australia there are mines with all the 300ton haul trucks completely automated - driving from the face to the crusher and back with no humans. Never speeding, never taking a corner too quickly, never over accelerating or over braking. The savings in tire wear alone are enormous.

That's amazing. Where can I read more about this?

http://www2.sandvik.com/sandvik/0120/Internet/Global/S003713...

http://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature41780/

AutoMine systems are currently operating at Codelco's El Teniente Mine in Chile (since June 2004), Inmet Mining's Pyhäsalmi Mine in Finland (since January 2005), De Beers' Finsch Mine in South Africa (since August 2005) and Williams Mine in Canada (June 2007). A system is also installed in Sandvik's Test Mine in Tampere, Finland, which is used as a platform for developing and testing future system developments and for demonstration purposes.

Interesting. Do you guys rely on GPS with corrections alone or do you use active sensing? I imagine ladar is not that great in dusty conditions?

GPS tends not to work terribly well 1000m underground.

They use a combination of laser scanners following the contours of the wall and triangulating from fixed reflective prisms. Sometimes around crushers/trains you use buried electric cables or magnets for precise sensing.

Surface mining uses GPS and lasers, in the bottom of an open pit GPS requires a bunch of expensive repeater stations because of the poor sky view.

I didn't realize this was underground mining. So, you're really working on driverless trains, not cars or trucks, correct?

> I didn't realize this was underground mining. So, you're really working on driverless trains, not cars or trucks, correct?

Why would one think that "underground" implies trains?

Trains require tracks. Roads are less precise and have cheaper intersections.

They are diesel powered trucks which navigate by following the wall profile - slightly confusingly they are often called 'trams' because moving muck underground is called 'tramming' from the original medieval mine railways!

So that brings me to my original question -- what kind of sensing do you use on these trams, both to follow the walls and to detect obstacles?

Time of flight laser scanners (LIDAR). Scanners on each side of the truck measure the shape of the wall. you drive the truck down the tunnel once (in one system) it stores a map of the wall shape and then follows the same shape to keep the same distance form the walls.

Another laser scanner checks the tunnel ahead (and behind) for obstacles, other trucks, people, rockfalls etc.

On some systems a spinning laser on the top hits fixed prism reflectors with known position on the roof and walls, it constantly resects it's position from this.

Maybe because of this exchange in one of the pages he posted?

AH: Where did the concept of driverless trains come from and how will it enhance efficiency at the Pilbara mines?

GG: Automated trains have been around for some time in airports but they are not used on a heavy-oil long-haul railway network of this scale. We believe the network at the Pilbara mines to be one of the largest private railways in the world, so although the technology is not new, the scale is.

The railway stretches from our Pilbara ports to the mines, which covers roughly 330km. It's a long stretch and train drivers can only physically drive so far before being replaced. We only have a single driver per train, with each train stretching over 2.5km long usually consisting of 230 carriages. We cannot find enough train drivers to maintain our expansion forward and the ones we are hiring are getting older and harder to replace.

And here I was thinking Sandvik only makes excellent hand tools... Thanks for opening my eyes to this. And what an interesting job you must have.

This is related and blew my mind.

http://www.chiefog.com/drilling_process.html

One other small concern - are any of the programmers behind this from Rome?

Because if the AI on this system is designed by Roman drivers it might be safer for everyone to move out of Asia for the duration of the trip.

It's not racist - even people from Milan are scared of Roman drivers !

Good luck when they get to the streets of china. If they can auto drive through that then it's ready for anything...

Heh... reminds me of éX-Driver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Driver#Overview). I think the idea has potential, but I don't think it will be safely feasible.

> "A test drive off campus on Thursday illustrates the many hazards. A tractor trailer blocked visibility entering a busy traffic circle, forcing the lead vehicle to inch tentatively into oncoming cars. When it did find a break, there wasn't enough time for the second vehicle to follow before another car inserted itself between them, cutting off communication"

A stressed out driver stuck in a traffic jam on the highway would probably in many cases be many times safer with automatic car control than driving manually.

It can be extremely stressful when you're stuck in a traffic jam and have to pick a kid in kindergarten.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com