Mariana Minerals set to add Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot to sensor-based arsenal at Copper One
Mariana Minerals is set to deploy Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot, Spot®, at its Copper One facility in Utah, USA, to help capture data, automate routine inspections and reduce strain on operators in the field.
The company’s Mining Autonomy Lead, Lukas Fahle, says Mariana Minerals is very much focused on “software first”, looking to bring sensor solutions that are deployed in the field into its software framework to eventually act on that data for more informed decision making.
At Copper One, the team is extracting ore from a sedimentary hosted orebody and then crushing and putting that on a leach pad, extracting copper ore and refining into 99% pure copper cathode that then gets sold to customers.
Fahle said: “I first heard about Spot when I was in college actually getting my PhD. I was working on LiDAR scanning solutions in underground mines and pretty quickly came across Spot as a robotic solution that would be able to carry that payload and collect that data.
“I think the primary application when we start out is going to be doing inspections across the plant that currently take quite a bit of time of our operators to walk the plant. What we really hope to do is relieve those operators of these fairly tedious tasks and help them get more time back to do more value add tasks.
“Once Spot is fully deployed, I’m really most excited about all the use cases that our teams, our operators can identify on-site that we haven’t even really thought about yet. The teams that do these jobs every single day, they will see exactly what Spot could be good at and great at. They will give us a lot of ideas that we can then utilise and figure out what are the most value add use cases.”
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