Shaolong Sui, Founder of BuilderX, the leading player in remote control mining excavator solutions and technology, argues that the biggest bottleneck in mining automation is no longer transportation. It’s excavation. “Over the past decade, autonomous haul trucks have moved from pilot projects to large-scale deployment. The business case is clear, and adoption continues to accelerate. Yet fully autonomous excavators remain rare in production environments. Why?”
Sui says this is because excavation is fundamentally a more complex problem than hauling. “A haul truck follows a relatively predictable workflow. An excavator interacts with a constantly changing environment, where every bucket requires new decisions about material conditions, digging angles, bucket trajectories, and loading strategies.”
From Sui’s perspective, five major challenges continue to slow the path toward autonomous excavation. First, harsh operating environments make reliable perception difficult due to dust, lighting changes, vibration, and evolving terrain. Second, real-time decision-making is required for every digging cycle, not just route planning.
Third, complex motion planning must coordinate multiple machine components while balancing safety, productivity, and equipment constraints. Fourth, non-linear hydraulic systems make precise machine control significantly more difficult. Finally, limited training data remains a major obstacle. Unlike autonomous driving, the industry still lacks large-scale excavation datasets needed to train and validate AI models.
Sui: “This is why I believe the most important technology in mining today may not be fully autonomous excavation. It’s remote operation. Remote operation improves safety, reduces operator exposure to hazardous environments, enables centralised operations, and – equally important – creates the operational data needed to build future autonomous systems. In many ways, remote operation is not competing with autonomy. It’s enabling it.”
He argues that the path forward will likely be Manual Operation to Remote Operation to Assisted Digging to Full Autonomy. “The future of autonomous excavation is coming. But before machines can learn to dig on their own, they first need opportunities to learn from the people who already do it best.”
The attached image show six remote control shovel operators using BuilderX technology at Baosteel’s Bayan Obo iron ore mine in Inner Mongolia, China. The mine launched a smart mine project back in 2020 to remove operators from the noise, dust, vibration and cold winters in the pit.
In 2021, the mine implemented intelligent remote control for its shovels, utilising BuilderX systems to modify both electric rope shovels and hydraulic excavators – as well as other equipment. The tech utilises intelligent AI features such as precise position monitoring, collision avoidance and data analytics. The BuilderX system also offers visibility enhancement in dusty conditions, bucket tooth monitoring, block ID and terrain side profile scanning.
Today, thanks to autonomous trucks and remote control shovels, the mine has improved the working environment for operators, and ensured the safety of these employees. At the same time, it can reduce the number of operators going back and forth to the workplace which represents a reduction in operating costs.
At the end of 2022, the Baiyun Obo mine went on to open a dedicated Smart Control Center Building to lay a more solid foundation for the unmanned operation of mines. Following additional systems added in 2025, today, six remote intelligent control systems for shovels are in regular operation for Taiyuan Heavy (TYHI) rope shovels (WK-10 and WK-20) plus XCMG XE3000 hydraulic excavators using a 5G network.