An important milestone for underground mining worldwide has been achieved by Chile-based global explosives and blasting major Enaex through its innovations in robotics and automation, developed by its Enaex Robotics division. During April 2022, a 100% remote, robotic and autonomous loading operation, which it claims as the world’s first, was carried out for development operations in underground mining, this being the first of many robotic loadings in a production mine that will be carried out during 2022 with the UG- iTruck® robotic loading equipment developed by Enaex where a robotic loading arm autonomously positions and loads explosives at the face.

Marco Ruiz Hernandez, Enaex Robotics Director at Enaex stated: “The main challenge we are solving with this technology is the operation in complex areas and with the presence of operational risks such as rock burst, geomechanical instabilities and seismicity, especially present in deep mining. With the UG-iTruck®, the risk present in special operations, where there is high exposure, is eliminated, moving people to a safe place where the entire system is controlled remotely.” It means operators are not exposed to ground instability and other geomechanical risks.

The equipment is designed to load explosives in development tunnels, with the ability to measure the profile of each drillhole and clean them if necessary, then assemble boosters and detonators robotically, load emulsion, tram and detonate without the need for tie-up since wireless electronic detonators are used, thus making the blast from a safe area inside or outside the mine. UG-iTruck has a mechanised priming system and can manufacture Ugex Full Face®, an emulsion with a variable density that allows precision blasting and high performance. The the entire process is monitored from a remote control station or a centralised operations station.