Leading open pit mining fleet autonomous technology provider TAGE Idriver recently won a bid to retrofit seven XCMG XDE240 220 ton payload trucks for unmanned operations at the Shengli No.1 open pit coal mine north of Xilinhaote City in Inner Mongolia at an altitude of 970-1,100 m. The mine is operated by Shenhua Nortel Victory Energy Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China Shenhua, itself owned by CHN Energy and has annual production capacity of 28 million tons with recoverable reserves estimated at 1.89 billion tons.

The autonomous trucks will be converted to allow for unmanned loading, haulage and unloading and will use TAGE Idriver’s innovative Kuanggu – loosely translated Unmanned Valley automation platform. The east-west trend of the Shengli mine surface boundary is 6.84 km long, the north-south trend is 5.43 km wide, and the mine area covers 37.14 km2. The climate is challenging – in spring and autumn, sand and dust are an issue with wind gusts over 130 km/h. The annual average temperature is 2 °C, but ranging from a maximum temperature of 40°C down to -40 °C in winter. The sustained winter cold is a real issue as it often results in parked trucks as it is too cold for operators, affecting production efficiency. The implementation of the unmanned program will help improve the productivity of the whole mining area.

At present Shengli No.1 has nearly 100 mining trucks in use, and the fleet will continue to expand plus the company plans that all vehicles in the mine will eventually be operated in driverless mode including shovels, bulldozers, road graders, crushing stations, mining trucks and other types of machinery.

The main management leaders of Shengli went on two visits with TAGE Idriver to mines where it already has autonomous trucks running – Baiyun Obo Iron Mine and the Yongshun Coal Mine – both also in Inner Mongolia. The visits served the customer in better understanding project implementation deployment of autonomy and how unmanned mining vehicles work in a real mine in mixed fleets and 24/7 operation. In July 2021, TAGE Idriver, its mining truck OEM partner China NHL and Beijing Zhengfengkai Environmental Protection Holding Group also visited Shenhua Nortel to carry out multi-level cooperation exchanges on open-pit intelligent mining and unmanned transportation as a full stack service.

In the bidding process a specific requirement was to support cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) security terminal access and to be compatible with a 4G private wireless network (1.8 GHz), a 4G public network as well as being 5G ready, and also able to be connected to a driverless vehicle safety monitoring system. TAGE Idriver states: “We are the only manufacturer in the autonomy industry with a self-developed onboard hardware platform, M-Box, now in its third iteration. It is an integrated 5G communication module, has passed China 3C and network access certification, as well as China Institute of Metrology rated for high and low temperature, vibration, humidity and other environmental aspects. It has also passed a number of vehicle specification level testing certification, including EMC. It is one of the earliest on-board domain controllers in China that integrates 5G + C-V2X communication, plus supports high-performance parallel computing, high security decision control and has passed vehicle regulation certification.”