ABSTRACT
Let us consider the case of a well-known multinational mining corporation, with its headquarters in Australia. This company is moving towards the deployment of driverless trucks that are monitored, but not controlled, by on-site computers. Information is fed back to this on-site system from sensors located in each of the main bearings in each of the trucks, which allows the system to calculate when these bearings should be scheduled for maintenance. Sensors located on the trucks also feed information back to the central computer systems on the quality of ore and depth of overburden so that algorithms can determine how best to access the ore while saving on fuel used to remove the overburden. Other software modules on the central computer can calculate the number of railway carriages required per day to deliver the ore, that is still to be extracted, to port facilities based on extraction algorithms that draw upon a comprehensive three-dimensional map of all the relevant geological strata. It is important to emphasize that this particular case is not the creation of speculative fiction, but one that is already in operation.
