At the Vostochny coal mine in the city of Ekibastuz, unmanned dump trucks will be tested this year. Serik Shakhazhanov, General Director of the Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) in Kazakhstan, announced this at the Digital Almaty 2024 forum: “Industry X: digital evolution of the future,” a Kazinform agency correspondent reports.
— In 2024, we will pilot three unmanned dump trucks at the Vostochny open-pit coal mine. This year we want to transport a million cubic meters of rock mass by drones. By 2027, we want to transport 115 million tons of rock mass by drones. All these products were created by specialists from our division; we employ about a thousand IT specialists,” he said.
The speaker also invited the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry to jointly test a project to switch to unmanned dump trucks.
— I wanted to suggest to the ministry that we are ready to become the platform on which we can experiment and look from the point of view of industrial safety and IT legislation: what is an unmanned vehicle at an industrial facility, what are the necessary requirements for an unmanned vehicle to drive and produce volume, for the sake of which it is done. By 2027, we plan to transfer one quarry completely to unmanned dump trucks,” said Serik Shakhazhanov.
He noted that the company began a digitalization program in 2020, and since 2021, investments in innovative technologies have amounted to $120 million.
