Resources for a robotic future

From Rio Tinto’s self-driving trucks to Woodside Petroleum’s Robonaut, the resources industry has been no stranger to testing out the capabilities of new technologies to perform repetitive and sometimes dangerous tasks.

But what impact will this have on the sector’s processes?

Speaking at a business lunch last week, BHP president operations minerals Australia Mike Henry said he anticipated the resources giant would have always have thousands of people employed at its Pilbara mines, as he believed not all roles were relevant to automation.

OZ Minerals chief executive Andrew Cole has a different vision.

At the inaugural Amazon Web Services (AWS) Innovation Day in Perth last week, which attracted more than 500 people, Mr Cole outlined plans for the Carapateena copper mine in South Australia.

“Our vision is for this to be a completely autonomous, electric-operated mine, one kilometre below the surface,” Mr Cole said.

He emphasised the role big data analytics would play.

“It’s very dependent on bandwidth, data and analysis, to be able to predict how the operation is going to run,” he said.

Mr Cole said OZ management had recognised the company needed to develop a culture of innovation, and as such was one of the first companies to implement the online data management system, SAP Hana, on the AWS cloud.

“Not only did the team do it in 10 months, they did it ahead of schedule, under budget and the very first month’s close out was accurate,” he said.

Mr Cole was so impressed he took his executive team to AWS headquarters in Seattle, US, to get insights into the culture and operations of the cloud-computing platform.

Speaking at the same event, Woodside chief technology officer Shaun Gregory highlighted the role played by data analytics and artificial intelligence in lifting the company’s operational efficiency.

When the Pluto LNG plant was built, 250,000 sensors were installed in various components, where they were all connected to AWS in one go.

Woodside is now able to monitor every sensor every minute of every day, which helps to optimise its operations and even predict plant outages.

Last month, the company welcomed R2 C3, an Anthropomorphic Robonaut System, designed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).

Under Woodside’s partnership with Nasa, the humanoid robot will spend five years in Western Australia, where Woodside will test potential tasks suggested by the company’s operators, engineers and maintenance workers.

Mr Gregory said ideas included high-voltage switching and as a first responder to alarms on unmanned platforms. Currently, if anything goes wrong, people are sent out via helicopter into a risky environment, sometimes just to turn a valve.

R2 uses cameras and sensors to determine spatial awareness as well as how much force it needs to pick up an object.

“We are looking for ways we can use robotics to reduce risk for our workforce and help us perform a wide range of tasks that complement activities carried out by our people,” Mr Gregory said.

“We believe innovation and collaboration can lead to solving some of our industry’s largest and most complex challenges and contribute to safe, efficient and reliable operations for our business.”

Development

Edith Cowan University School of Engineering associate dean Alexander Rassau said, like Woodside, researchers were exploring ways to develop a robot’s autonomous abilities.

“Traditionally, robots have been very successful in structured environments, like a manufacturing or automobile plant, where they’re doing the same tasks over and over again,” Professor Rassua told Business News.

“That’s been great from a mass-production perspective, but in terms of translating them into something that has more diverse uses, it is early stages.

“Now we are trying to grow the capability of robots to operate in unstructured environments; giving robots the capacity to make reasoned decisions.”

Professor Rassau said the challenge for the robotics industry was developing this cognitive function.

One of his students was working on a vision system – looking at how robots can perceive an environment and interpret what it sees in meaningful ways.

“Pushing the boundaries in that space at the moment are autonomous vehicles,” Professor Rassau said.

“They require all of that visualisation and sensor fusion of various ways of actually being able to figure out what’s going on around them, making decisions on what to do, in a dynamic and unpredictable environment.”

Despite recent advancements, Professor Rassau said robotics was still 20 or 30 years away from causing any major social change.

“No doubt in our lifetime there will be some dramatic changes in the way a lot of jobs are carried out,” he said.

“And I very much hope that there are policy makers that are starting to contemplate what the impacts of this could have.”