DRILL & BLAST
PARTNERS
PERFECT
An Australian project showcases how two experts are working together to develop a drill rig that pushes the boundaries of autonomous mining
The SmartROC D65 is an autonomous rig garnering praise for how precise it is W
e’ve entered Nick Howlett’s sandpit. That’s what it feels like, anyway. It’s deep
in the Outback, 1,500km north of Perth. Take a 90-minute flight from the Western Australian capital, drive 20 minutes into the Iron Bridge mine, past its expansive camp, then past the mine’s operations centre and towering crusher. Wend your way further, climbing
beyond the central pit, and there you’ll find an Epiroc SmartROC D65 surface drill working a drill pattern. The rig finishes a hole, collects its pipes and trams to the next in the sequence. It
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could be a typical blast-drilling scene, but for one striking difference – there’s no operator in the cabin. Five kilometres away, back down
the hill in the mine’s operations center, Howlett watches by video link as the SmartROC D65 drills another hole. And another. And then another. He smiles. 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,” says Graham Howard, Director of Operations at Iron Bridge. You can find an occasional shard of
magnetite sitting on the Martian-red earth. The beguiling black mineral is scorching hot under the 45ºC 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,
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