Autonomous Haulage System: 10th Anniversary of Commercial Deployment
Back in 2005, we began trial operations of our Autonomous Haulage System (AHS) at Codelco's copper mine in Chile, and succeeded in achieving the world's first commercial deployment of AHS with Codelco in January 2008. January 2018 marks the 10th anniversary.
As of December 31, 2017, there were over 100 AHS trucks operating around the clock, hauling iron ores, copper and coal, in six mines in Australia, Chile and Canada.
In the period of 10 years, the AHS recorded a cumulative total of 1.5 billion tons of hauled materials. While meeting different geological and climate conditions, AHS not only features outstanding safety compared to manned hauling trucks, but also has improved customer productivity, reducing loading and hauling unit costs by more than 15%*. In addition, the optimized automatic controls of the AHS reduce sudden acceleration and abrupt steering, resulting in 40%* improvement in tire life. Further, with such benefits of AHS deployment, we have also provided important value to customers in terms of reducing the environmental impact.
In 2017, we successfully completed trials of our AHS retrofit kit for manned 830E electric dump trucks (maximum payload: 220 tons), and have received orders in Australia.