Transcription
[Music] Artificial intelligence, autonomous machines, and robots are technologies that everyone is talking about. But these technologies still seem, to many of us, a bit like science fiction. However, many companies are already deploying solutions based on these technologies today to solve business problems, problems, create value, and return on investment, like this team is doing right [Music] now.
Gruber's goal is to be a world-class sustainable mineral producer, and currently, it has one of the industry's lowest carbon footprints. Their ambition is to rid their production of all CO2 emissions by 2025. That requires new technologies and new processes.
As a key contractor for Rag and other mining and infrastructure operations, Norwegian contractor LNS has to meet an increasingly demanding market, and innovation is required to develop methods that improve how they execute their work. Things like increased productivity without compromising safety. In fact, in increasing safety, reduction of costs related to a specialist's hours or travel, challenges with lack of access to specialist competences and manpower, sustainability targets, these things can all be addressed with robots, and LNS is well ahead of many competitors in deploying autonomous and remotely operated robots.
In a research project co-founded by the Norwegian Research Council and supported by Trimble, Boston Dynamics, and and local partner Building Point Scandinavia, LNS has completed all key field testing of robot dog Spot from Boston Dynamics that has been planned this year. And we've been testing Spot in, I think, one of the most challenging environments uh that it's been in that I've seen, configured with a laser scanner, but also other technology payloads like a 360° camera and SLAM lidar. They have demonstrated that Spot can be used for remotely controlled or even fully autonomous scanning and surveying in open pit mines, and now recently even underground. This opens up for increased safety while at the same time reduction in turnaround time to increase productivity. It may also reduce travel cost and hours spent by specialists on the project.
The technical requirements that must be met in order for this to be successful are quite demanding or even futuristic, but let's get back to the technical aspects later. First, let's investigate how LNS expects to get return on investment from this project. On one certain project, they expect to get return on investment in the following areas: reduced surveyor workload, saved hours in the range of two full man-years, around €200,000 per year; reduced downtime in projects because they can work in unsecured areas, savings in the range of €30,000 per year; reduced staff cost, travel, etc., because of the remote operations function and autonomous operations, around €15,000 per year. This results in total expected savings in the range of €250,000 on one particular project per year, as an example.
And then you have values which are more difficult to quantify, but they're very important for the Massa company and their employees and customers. Innovation creates opportunities for new processes, new revenue streams. This can have a direct impact on the bottom line, or even make them more attractive as a business partner and contractor. The increased efficiency and reduction in travel also has a significant impact on their operations in terms of sustainability, and finally, and probably most importantly, increased safety.
So, this week really, really got to test out a lot of good, good things here at at Moana. Spot has been through field testing for LNS in two main configurations. First, the open pit mine solution that was field tested in Tana in February of 2023, takes advantage of GNSS to position the robot. We can't rely on manual mapping with the robot before we go go out on missions here. So, we've once again tested the GNSS functionality for outdoor navigation with Spot in the open pit mines, like the one that you see behind me. Using a local internet connection in the mine and remote operation software, the robots can be controlled from anywhere in the world, or even operate autonomously with pre-planned missions. This allows for the site manager to carry out scanning missions without the need for a specialist on [Music] site.
But we've also introduced the additional challenge of underground tunnels beneath the mountains here. The field test in Muana and Rub focused on underground surveying. Underground, Spot cannot rely on satellite positioning, and other methods are needed. One such method that was put to the test in R was SLAM lidar technology, explore mapping, so allowing the robot to explore unmapped areas of the tunnels, return a low-resolution 3D map, and then do subsequent planning for higher-resolution scans using the Trimble X7 solution with the Spot robot. The way the SLAM lidar solution could work is this: Spot is assigned an exploration volume, which is a rough outline of the area to be scanned, and then autonomously it maps out the area with the lidar. This provides a medium-accuracy scan of the tunnels in in a very short time, the time it takes to walk the length of the areas to be scanned, since the lidar scanning can be carried out while moving. These scans can then form a rough map or blueprint for Spot for subsequent laser scanning at much higher accuracy, which is required in many cases.
The field tests demonstrated that this solution is viable, but it also helped identify risks that the team will have to deal with. Fant for test using these two configurations of Spot, LNS will have a way to carry out accurate scans with a laser scanner in areas where one could not do this before for safety reasons. Neither the open pit mine nor the underground mine solutions required the specialist to be on site to carry out the job. This empowers the local operations management and offers increased productivity and a return on investment for [Music] LNS. [Music] [Music]