How Autonomous Mining Trucks Can Benefit from Cooperative Coordination and Connected Vehicles Theory: a Proposed Architecture for Motion Coordination

Abstract

Open-pit mines are increasingly adopting the automation in their mining operations. Autonomous transport trucks are already present in mines and have demonstrated their benefits over manual transport activities. Except that, most researches dealing with the problems associated with the deployment of autonomous mining trucks focus on improving methods of perception, decision-making and planning without expanding the vision and considering multiple trucks that interact and collaborate by exploiting individual capacities to optimize the collective of connected trucks. This work presents, for the first time to authors’ knowledge, the concept of collaborative and connected autonomous mining trucks based on concepts developed in vehicle communications theory and cooperative driving principles. The architecture proposed in this work is based on V2V communication and a decentralized decision-making approach.