With mining's show of shows Minexpo little more than six months' away, expect to see many announcements from original equipment manufacturers about the technologies they will be introducing.

Electrification will continue to be a theme, as it has been for the past decade.

Epiroc and Sandvik have been at the forefront of this area in the underground mining space and have invested organically and through acquisition in building this technology.

Caterpillar, which was still working out its battery chemistry approach years after Epiroc and Sandvik already had machines in the field, is pushing harder into this space.

Komatsu, while a late entrant to the underground hard rock space, is growing its fleet too. It plans to launch several products this year including load-haul-dump vehicles, jumbo drills and bolters, some with battery-electric drivelines.

Diesel-electric is an emerging technology in the underground space.

Traditionally most underground loaders and trucks have used diesel engines with mechanical drives. However, just as happened in the surface space, the idea of using a diesel engine to drive wheel motors is gaining traction.

Komatsu actually took that approach with its very first underground hard rock loaders, launched at Minexpo in 2016. That was the fruit of its takeover of Joy Global, which had picked up the LeTourneau switched-reluctance technology along the way. LeTourneau was renowned for its massive surface mining wheel loaders, the largest of which, the L2350, could load a 363t truck in just five passes.

Caterpillar has the R2900XE underground loader, its first with diesel-electric motivation.

Diesel-electric may prove to be a handy step for those miners wanting to get into electrification.

In Australia most of the underground hard rock mines use declines as their main form of access. There is yet to be an electric truck that can make its way up a standard decline on one charge, let alone do it over and over again during a 12-hour shift.

A diesel-electric truck actually handles the grade as well, if not better, than its mechanical drive counterpart.

It will provide a good teaching tool to prepare maintenance personnel for full electrification. Take the diesel engine out and replace it with a battery pack and there is a battery-electric loader or truck.

Automation has been a growing theme underground for decades. Interoperability will be an even bigger part of that as the adoption of the technology advances.

Companies such as Epiroc, Caterpillar and Sandvik are preparing for that.

While electrification offers massive benefits in terms of carbon emissions the challenges have not reduced much.

There is still a lot of infrastructure thinking that needs to be done ahead of any electrification. For example, how much electricity will the mine need and where will it come from? Once miners used to look at how much electricity they could afford and then bought a mill based on that. If they want to add electrification of trucks, loaders and drills to that there are more sums to be done. The power draw of eight loaders and eight trucks has been described as "monstrous".

Additional skills, such as battery maintenance, will be needed as electrification is introduced. There is the electrical part but the machines will still have a large mechanical component. Adding automation to that means other skill sets will have to be added to the mix.

Automation

Epiroc new technology integration expert Justin Quigley said the company understood that to succeed in the automation space meant any systems had to be OEM agnostic with interoperability capabilities.

"We are already incorporating other OEMs into our automation systems and now with RCT joining the Epiroc group, we have a great opportunity to provide further solutions to our customers and grow in this area," he said.

"For material handling we have our ‘Deep Automation' suite, which we refer to as the vast array of material handling loader or underground haulage truck automation equipment and systems.

"Within this rapidly advancing area of the business there is an enormous number of new technologies either already being released or being developed.

"Systems such as Level 9 collision avoidance that work in with fleet management systems for improved safety and productivity, Muckpile Autodetect, autonomous truck dumping, autonomous battery charging, autoloading and mixed fleet autonomy are all in the pipeline with material handling automation."

Then there are systems to help operators work better.

"Systems such as Downhill Descent Assist for haul trucks, Load Assist and Drive Assist for loaders to name just a few," Quigley said.

Sandvik business line manager automation Andrew Atkinson said the company's view of the future was to provide higher levels of automation across mining in general.

He believes the automation capabilities will only increase and the challenge will be in changing the way miners use it to make sure they maximise its potential.

"In the future with what we're developing around our Next Generation automation, that will change the game with the way the machines operate," Atkinson said.

It will use three-dimensional mapping and high-definition cameras alongside a navigation drive path and machine control algorithms, allowing for faster setup to operational time with higher adaptivity and reliability in dynamic changing environments.

"In the future the maximum potential of the equipment will change," Atkinson said.

"In each of the scenarios there's a level of skillset or maturity that the operations have to have to unlock that potential.

"How do we service those operations through that change management process?"

Loading

A standout feature of Sandvik's autonomous systems is its Autoload functionality.

Getting load-haul-dump vehicles to tram and even dump autonomously was solved years ago. Getting them to dig autonomously was harder.

Sandvik started out with Autoload Assist in 2021. It required an operator to initiate autonomous loading.

Sandvik launched version 2.0 of its Autoload system last year, which has an added feature that lets operators teach loaders different loading profiles for each drawpoint. Once the loader has "learnt" the operator no longer needs to help it load the bucket. The profiles can be saved for later use.

Good fragmentation will be the key to getting the best from Autoload 2.0.

Drilling

Atkinson said Sandvik had extended its automation offering to production drills, which allowed teleremote operation of onboard automatic systems, which allows one operator to handle up to three drills at a time.

Sandvik's Rock Tools has Autobit, a carbide bit that can last the length of a shift change.

In the near future Sandvik should have a production drill bit changer that will complement the Autobit performance and allow for further automation during the shift without human interaction.

"With mines getting deeper, shift changes are getting longer," Atkinson said.

"We have customers who are operating now during shift changes and blasting."

Quigley said including Epiroc's Carrier Control System on its Mk11 Drilling portfolio to automate the carrier opened up many opportunities.

"This is already well underway with the "Adaptive Automation" project, which is a new teleremote project for Boomers," he said.

"As part of this project and in addition to the teleremotes, Epiroc recently released a variety of new Rig Control System and Carrier Control System functions and features.

"Some of these features include machine Auto-levelling, Set-up Assistance and Epiroc Scanner, which is our latest and greatest three-dimensional scanner that can be used for work area scanning to compare actual excavation profiles to design as well as being able to conduct rig navigation.

"Now with the two interoperating systems capabilities as well as the new functions and features, it enables future potential for a kind of step change toward full drilling equipment teleremote operations, inclusive of tramming and driving. This is in Epiroc's vision and road map for success."

Optimisation

Atkinson said the use of autonomous technologies on the equipment had evolved.

"Customers have worked out they can get high utilisation and performance through automation," he said.

"We're seeing a lot more consistent use of the technologies automation offers.

"With Polymathian and Deswik [companies Sandvik bought in 2022 and 2021 respectively] we can start looking at optimisation.

"Newtrax collision avoidance [bought in 2019] can allow for more machines and possibly even humans in autonomous areas."

Epiroc has Proximity and Barrier to help keep workers safe. Some of those systems come from its recent acquisition of Mernok.

Another way of optimising operation is through better training.

To that end Epiroc has been exploring the virtual reality realm.

"Virtual reality has been high on the agenda now for some time for Epiroc and is already being used within our Next Gen simulations," Quigley said.

Electrification

On the electrification front Quigley said acquisitions Epiroc made to complement its portfolio of underground battery drivelines would help it expand in this space.

"With battery charging infrastructure from Meglab and high voltage electrical services from JTMEC, we have a full suite of solution providers for this new underground technology as well."

Sandvik business line manager load and haul Andrew Dawson said it was no secret the industry was moving towards electrification.

"All the OEMs are doing it," he said.

Sandvik acquired battery electric equipment maker Artisan in 2019, which had specialised in developing battery-electric equipment.

That gave Sandvik the ability to apply its own battery electrics with Artisan's to accelerate its electric equipment development while still building on its diesel offering.

Dawson believes electrification will move at different speeds in different jurisdictions.

"Electrification is really good for other parts of the world such as North America," he said.

"Canada is a little further along in deploying BEVs and being able to operate it and support it."

Infrastructure will have to be considered.

Dawson said customers had to consider where they would place chargers and understand cycle times.

"Battery technology will grow and evolve over the coming years," he said.

"There may be a time in our careers where a miner will be able to get a shift out of a truck on a single battery charge."

Atkinson said there were a number of companies that had the capability to run a fully-electric fleet.

"It more or less exists," he said.

"It's who has the investment in the infrastructure and the access to clean energy as well."

Electrification has been extended into the drilling realm too.

Sandvik business line manager underground drills Nathan Cunningham said the company had supplied five BEV production and development drills to customers.

"From a drill point of view we don't have to change anything," he said.

Drills only need to tram relatively short distances and once there they plug into mine power, air and water. That power link not only operates the drill, it also charges the battery.

Diesel-electric

Sandvik is another OEM developing diesel-electric underground equipment.

"We expect to have a range of diesel-electric equipment in loading and trucking over the next few years," Dawson said.

"One benefit of diesel-electric is it creates a competency level that you can start off with before going to high-voltage.

"It can be a really slow step but it is a path the mines or contractors can follow. As we go closer to electric mines, the competencies will be there."

Dawson is not ruling out a Prius-like hybrid option either.

He believes adding automation to BEV LHDs will help miners maximise their benefits such as speed and breakout force.

"We should be starting to see that this year," Dawson said.

"The products themselves will continue to develop.

"We have quite a robust roadmap going out to the coming years."

With battery electric machines Sandvik is using battery swaps to keep the equipment going.

That battery swap poses a problem when it comes to fully automating operation. How does the battery get plugged in?

"The exciting future of this is how we would automate the battery plug in," Dawson said.

"At the moment a human has to come to plug and charge the batteries."