Deep in the Outback, 1500km north of Perth, you will find the Iron Bridge mine. Venture past its expansive camp, then the mine's operations centre and towering crusher and climbing beyond the central pit, an Epiroc SmartROC D65 surface drill working a drill pattern comes into view. The rig finishes a hole, collects its pipes and trams to the next in the sequence. It could be a typical blast-drilling scene, but for one striking difference – there is no operator in the cabin.

Back down the hill in the mine's operations centre, 5km away, Nick Howlett, an Epiroc automation specialist, watches by video link as the SmartROC D65 drills another hole. And another. And then another. Welcome to the future of autonomous mining.

Iron Bridge is an ambitious joint venture mining project between Fortescue Metals Group subsidiary FMG Magnetite and Formosa Steel IB, the US$3.9 billion operation producing high-grade magnetite.

"It's great to be working with Epiroc here at Iron Bridge and seeing the SmartROC D65 drill in action," Graham Howard, director of operations at Iron Bridge, said.

Extreme conditions

You can find an occasional shard of magnetite sitting on the Martian-red earth. The beguiling black mineral is scorching hot under the 45C sun. Those kinds of temperatures make this an ideal place to trial any equipment, autonomous or not. But Iron Bridge presents other opportunities to put this new test version of the SmartROC D65 Autonomous through its paces. The magnetite is buried in hard rock beneath metres of looser clay-like soil and then transitional earth, meaning the rig is drilling under various conditions.

"We want that," Howlett said. "It's how we develop and make a good product."

Fortescue has a reputation for being a forward-thinking mining house. It has been pursuing autonomous solutions for well over a decade, making it a natural partner in the SmartROC D65 Autonomous programme.

Epiroc and Fortescue entered a partnership in 2021 to trial this MKII version of Epiroc's SmartROC D65 Autonomous. This project followed a 2018 SmartROC D65 Autonomous MKI pilot project in Canada. A successful test would provide Fortescue with an autonomous blast drill solution and Epiroc with vital test intel under realistic mining conditions.

Autonomy

"There's no doubt autonomous is the way the industry's going," Wayne Sterley, Epiroc Australia general manager and managing director, said. "And that speaks to the inherent productivity, efficiency and safety gains of autonomous solutions."

An autonomous SmartROC D65 rig's advantages are not down to pure speed but tend to accumulate over time via the clever use of autonomous subsystems and the high quality and consistency of the holes it produces.

"A manual operator could maybe beat us over an hour or so, but that's not what it's about," Howlett said. "It's about consistency. When the operator goes for a break, we drill. If there's blasting nearby, we drill. And our shift changes tend to be shorter.

"We've spent a lot of time perfecting how the rig drills autonomously, including water control, how it starts a hole, and the tricky aspects of collaring. We've also tuned it for different types of ground, with five different settings. You set these different parameters, the operator selects one and the drill gets to work."

The SmartROC D65 Autonomous has also had an edge in pre-split drilling. At Iron Bridge, operators drill up to 30m at an angle, meaning it is relatively easy for unintended deviations in holes. The autonomous rig has been more precise in these scenarios, making for better drilling predictions and, in turn, easier drill plan adjustments.

Optimal consistency

Consistency also has positive impacts on equipment life cycles, with the SmartROC D65 MKII Autonomous rig's autonomous algorithms utilising components such as cylinders, feed chains, rotation heads, and rock drilling tools more optimally.

At its test site, the rig looks similar to a manually operated drill but features Lidar and cameras on the machine's front, back and top. There are also automation mode ("safe-to-board") lights for transitioning from remote to local operations. Surrounding traffic cones mark out the SmartROC D65 MKII Autonomous rig's "geofence", or perimeter of autonomous operations. Still, the real magic happens at the teleremote station back at the Iron Bridge operations centre.

Inside Iron Bridge's air-conditioned nerve centre is a hive of activity, with rows upon rows of personnel tapping away at workstations. The SmartROC D65 MKII Autonomous rig's teleremote station sits in a separate low-lit control room. It features two joysticks, a touch screen like that inside the rig, and three additional LCD screens that display critical operational information – hole and drill pattern progress, a video stream from the rig's onboard camera system, and the drill's technical state and alarms. And yet it just needs an internet connection and the station could be in Perth, where many Iron Bridge personnel live, or indeed anywhere in the world.

New opportunities

"Like any new tech, there's been some scepticism," Howlett said. "But [Fortescue] has begun to advertise for jobs for autonomous operators and there's been a lot of interest. One of the lads told me he sees it as an opportunity to see more of his family in Perth."

"We have the opportunity to put people in a safer working environment and help them be more productive and efficient," Sterley adds. "By taking on this digital transformation, we'll attract more talent into the industry."

So, what's next for the SmartROC D65 Autonomous programme? After success at Iron Bridge, 2024 is about tackling autonomous contour mining at Fortescue's nearby Solomon Hub.

"There's a lot of knowledge about path planning and obstacle detection but not about tramming for contour operations," Howlett said. "Those are wicked challenges. We're looking forward to giving it a crack."