Liebherr, the Swiss team giant, chose the Bauma Hall in Munich, Germany, to show the current state of its driving during the years to develop autonomous construction machines and mining, showing a generation of fall 6 l 550 XPOWER 20 tonnes, 220 hp of wheels.
The driverless wheeled loader roaring in the life gravel gravel out of the Liebherr stand in the three -tanning hall, running three -point vaults and depositing a pile of a pile to a loader on a section of rocks and dust.
There was a large number of human inputs, given the busy space of Expo: a Liebherr official was looking for the route on a laptop in the cabin before the loader went without a driver, and another dragged the machine with a small black and orange control box in his hand. At some point, the charger made an emergency stop (due to all the mobile phone traffic in the surrounding crowd, said Emcee Emcee Alexander Katrycz) and a Liebherr employee put himself in the cabin for the rest, although he kept his hands to prove he did not drive.
Wheel charger nerves are under control of the Liebherr Autonomous Operations System, developed at home. It works through 3D environmental sensors on board and, according to the company, is free of the need for support for drones, separate poll polls or GPS. A 360 ° laser scanner configuration is around the roof of the loader cabin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ1LNKHSKEY
The system shown by the loader is still in field tests, says spokesman Simon Truempler, but in June or July this year the company plans to intensify the deployments of testing with selected clients and look for the right time for a wider launch on the market.
Liebherr has invested a lot in semi-autonomous and fully autonomous machinery in recent decades, as the industry in general follows its production dreams whenever he sleeps, complains, hurts or wants to take a vacation.
Liebherr has been working with the Australian iron ore mining fortescue, which already collects the autonomous trucks in his mining fleet, to develop a scalable autonomous transport solution to execute jointly of electric mining formators developed jointly on a very large scale: with the T 264 of 240 tons, with forces designing the batteries and driving the body and the body.
The tests and development of these systems continue to the place of the Christmas Creek Mine of Fortesce that show land in Western Australia. The two companies reached an agreement of $ 2.8 billion last year to Campar 360 autonomous battery trucks, 55 electric excavators and 60 battery games.
In a wider way, there are autonomous trucks of more than 2000 more stripes deployed to surface mines worldwide, according to Komatsu and Caterpillar, who cite the Globaldata Mining Intelligence Center, with most of them. The giant Heidelberg material signed an agreement with Pronto in February to deploy 100 autonomous carriers worldwide. Mina Suncor has been directing autonomous transport trucks from Komatsu to petroleum sand places north of Fort McMurray in Canada for almost a decade.
But, really producing and unfolding smaller vehicles and running various types of truly autonomous machines and without a driver through a complicated constant moving space? These efforts are still in the early days, even if the concepts are in advanced development.
Volvo autonomous electric mining machines are still ongoing work
The electrification and operation of autonomous traffic on mining scenes on a small scale such as quarries and sands, which are more common than those found on the open floors of the west of Australia and northern Canada, could be more complicated.
Volvo’s construction equipment produced a concept of auto-learning battery electric wheel charger-LX03-at the end of 2021, with the design really developing from an initial collaboration with Lego. It is still an ongoing job.
The physicist and simulation expert, Martin Servin, at Algoryx and Umeå University, hopes that the variety of land types found in the world will continue to present challenges for autonomous transport, mining and construction machinery. Servin and his colleagues produce world -class physical models; Joined a small computer and physicist team in production World modeling for autonomous wheel loadersPart of a doctoral program supported by Komatsu for researcher Koji Aoshima.
“The ability to handle a more complex material than the uniform gravel -and to adapt to the form of batteries -has been an obstacle,” says Servin. The growing capacity of deep learning systems to react to data and the simulation of multimodal sensor means that more complex material, such as fragmented rocks, can now be handled. “The soil cohesive or heterogeneous soil is still a challenge. So are pebbles.”
In mining operations, the autonomous workspace faces other practical obstacles, says Moritz Ziegler, a lead engineer and group leadership at the Aachen’s Advanced Mining Institute of Mining Technologies. “For decades, the paradigm has always been to expand your mining truck: getting larger trucks, larger use, fewer trucks and more material transport,” he says. “But this approach is not feasible for electrification, in our opinion, due to the proportion of useful load with the battery and some other factors. Very soon they have technical limitations.”
Ziegler was in Bauma 2025 describing some of the case studies and experiments that his institution has been pursuing with partners such as Volvo Group and Mineral Baustoff in the places of Brownfield Eigenrieden and levelstein in Germany. The experiments are using the Tara system developed by Volvo Autonomous Solutions. What is unique here is to combine electrified transport with autonomy.
The potential of applications comes, but applying them to mining places on an individual smaller scale, with a single one, they put persistent obstacles. “If you use a high number of vehicles, it may quickly leave synchronization,” he says. “It’s harder than we thought earlier. You basically have to block the whole place in the mine where vehicles work for security reasons. It’s a real real process.”
Although it increases the large -scale deployment of a wide variety of driver -free machines, it may be adapted, but technology is coming. “Autonomous transport is definitely possible,” says Ziegler. “And it has reached the market.”
