Cat® MineStar™ Command for hauling manages the autonomous ecosystem to increase haulage efficiency, enhance safety

IRVING, Texas, September 20, 2024 – Caterpillar’s continuous investment and innovation in autonomous haulage with Cat® MineStar™ Command for hauling has resulted in hundreds of trucks operating at dozens of sites across three continents. Offering multiple layers of protection to enhance safety at the mine site, the Caterpillar autonomous haulage solution drives hauling consistency and predictability at operations to enhance productivity and reduce cost.

Leveraging decades of development and more than 11 years of operational experience, trucks equipped with Command for hauling have now surpassed 8.6 billion tonnes (9.5 billion tons) of material autonomously hauled. MineStar Command manages the autonomous ecosystem to increase haulage efficiency through less idle time, bunching at the loader, unnecessary empty travel and wasted fuel.

As the mining industry navigates the energy transition, Caterpillar recognizes productivity and energy management are interrelated and can drive total cost per ton. To address this, Caterpillar continues to develop and integrate new MineStar capabilities to support battery electric technology and charging solutions. These new offerings will manage the orchestration of energy and production across a mine site. 

Cat autonomous technology is key to enhancing mine site safety. Command for hauling enhances safety by removing haul truck operators from potentially hazardous conditions. Cat autonomous trucks can detect and react to surrounding conditions and obstacles as well as interact safely with staffed equipment and light vehicles using a combination of our advanced onboard perception system and proximity awareness. These technologies enable the trucks to maintain optimal following distances and safe operating speeds and, upon detecting an obstacle or anticipating an interaction, automatically stop or slow the truck’s speed. 

Cat MineStar Solutions impact the hauling operation in multiple ways – enabling fleet assignment, fully autonomous haulage, equipment tracking, production recording, material management, business insights, safety solutions, maintenance solutions and more. An optimized hauling strategy leveraging autonomy helps to support sustainable operations by moving more tons with fewer machines.

With retrofit kits available, today’s range of Cat mining trucks capable of fully autonomous operation span the 190- to 370- tonne (210- to 410-ton) class sizes, including the Cat 789D, 793D, 793F and 797F, as well as the electric drive 794 AC and high-altitude 798 AC models. Beyond haul trucks, the Cat 789D water truck platform can be equipped with Command for hauling, providing a fully autonomous solution to manage haul road dust. Soon, Caterpillar will expand autonomous haulage to its 139-tonne (153-ton), Cat 785. These models can be equipped with a portion of the autonomous kit from the factory, making them “Command-ready” to reduce installation time in the field.

Commodities mined around the world using Command for hauling include iron ore, copper, gold, coal, oil sands, lithium and traprock. The trucks face extremely challenging mining conditions, from the 40˚ C (104˚ F) heat and red dust in Western Australia to sub-freezing -40˚ C/F temperatures of the Canadian oil sands. They also operate in the deep pit copper mines of South America. 

Autonomous trucks of the future will play a crucial role in the energy transition, as systems like MineStar Command and Fleet will be essential to managing the battery usage for battery-electric trucks. Planned new capabilities will play a role in helping mines manage power by monitoring and orchestrating the complex balance of onboard energy, available charging assets and production targets to achieve the lowest operating cost.

Caterpillar is also scaling into quarry applications, demonstrated by the company’s collaboration with Luck Stone to deploy Command for hauling at its Bull Run Plant in Chantilly, Virginia, USA. This is Caterpillar’s first autonomous deployment – technology, process and people – in the aggregates industry and will expand the autonomous truck fleet to include the 90-tonne-class (100-ton-class) Cat 777.

MineStar Solutions offers a range of remote and autonomous applications besides autonomous haulage to help further optimize mine site operations. This includes Command for drilling to automate the drilling operation, Command for dozing to enable remote dozer operation and Command for underground to enable remote operation of load-haul-dump (LHD) machines.

More information about Cat Command for hauling can be found by contacting a Cat dealer or visiting https://www.cat.com/minestar. For more information about Cat Financial solutions tailored to meet the mine site’s specific needs for equipment acquisition, technology upgrades and maintenance, visit www.cat.com/catfinancial.

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