Autonomous Mining: Pit Ponies, Robot Trucks and ABB

A mine has to haul enormous amounts of rock, and for a long time people and animals did that hauling underground. Autonomous mining hands the job to machines that drive themselves, from ultra-class haul trucks in open pits to iron ore trains crossing the Australian outback with nobody in the cab. This post follows the work from pit ponies to remote operations centres and the first driverless fleets. It then looks at the trucks and trains running this year and at where ABB's robots and mine systems fit around them.

Ferrexpo's autonomous Cat 793D haul truck, loaded with rock, at its Yeristovo mine, 2021. Photo: RobSimmons223311 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From pit ponies to the first driverless fleets

In British coal mines, ponies pulled the coal tubs. The earliest known record of ponies working underground in Britain comes from the Durham coalfield in 1750, and their numbers grew after the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act barred women and young children from underground work. At the peak, in 1913, there were 70,000 ponies underground in Britain. A pony typically worked an eight-hour shift and might haul 30 tons of coal in tubs along the mine railways. Robbie, thought to be the last colliery horse to work underground in a British coal mine, retired from Pant y Gasseg near Pontypool in May 1999.

A pit pony hauls a wagon out of a coal mine while a miner stands beside it, around 1920. Photo: Albert Percy Godber / Alexander Turnbull Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Open pits moved the haulage into giant trucks with a driver in each cab, and the next step took the driver out. Komatsu's FrontRunner autonomous haulage system has been running for more than 17 years, and its early fleets worked at the Gaby and Radomiro Tomic mines. Gaby, Codelco's Gabriela Mistral copper mine in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, opened in 2008. Rio Tinto adopted the same trucks at scale in Western Australia's Pilbara, and by 2018 its fleet of 80 autonomous Komatsu trucks had moved more than 1 billion tonnes of ore and waste.

Looking north over Codelco's Radomiro Tomic open-pit mine in Chile, one of the sites of Komatsu's early autonomous fleets, 2018. Photo: Manxuc / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Rail followed. Rio Tinto's Hamersley railway in the Pilbara opened on 1 July 1966, and together with the Robe River line it now runs on about 1,700 km of track. AutoHaul, a decades-long, $1.7 billion project to automate more than two hundred of the company's locomotives, was completed in 2020 and became the world's first autonomous train network to reach operational status. The trains are watched from an operations centre in Perth, more than 1,500 km away. Some drivers stay on as a manual backup and to take trains the last mile into the port area.

An iron ore train leaving the Brockman 4 mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, 2011. Photo: Calistemon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Driverless trucks and trains at work in 2026

In April 2026 Komatsu commissioned its 1,000th autonomous ultra-class haul truck running FrontRunner, International Mining reported in September. Komatsu's Mike Rikkola described nearly two decades of work in real mines and said the system now connects with autonomous water trucks, remote and centralised control and trolley assist. Komatsu has also driven a power-agnostic electric-drive truck autonomously while it was connected to a trolley line. The company's own figures, as of October 2025, list more than 10 billion tons moved, no system-related injuries and an average 40 percent improvement in tire and brake life.

A Komatsu 930E-2 haul truck on display at Komatsu no Mori in Japan. Photo: Gamera866 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Quarries are next. Luck Stone's Bull Run Quarry in Virginia has hauled more than 3.5 million tons with autonomous Caterpillar trucks since going live in November 2024. In September Caterpillar said it would extend the system to Luck Stone's Boscobel and Bealeton sites, the first time it will automate the Cat 775 truck. Its autonomous trucks have hauled more than 13 billion tonnes in all. Volvo Autonomous Solutions passed 3 million tonnes of autonomous hauling the same month. At Brønnøy Kalk in Norway, nine of its driverless trucks run a five-kilometre route from quarry to crusher.

Caterpillar 797B haul trucks at Caterpillar's Tinaja Hills Demonstration and Learning Center, a site for testing mining equipment, 2014. Photo: MINING.com / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Electric haul trucks still have to be plugged in, and nobody rides along to do it. For that job ABB developed the eMine Robot Automated Connection Device with Boliden, BHP and Komatsu, a robot that connects the charger to a mining truck without anyone stepping in. ABB showed it at MINExpo 2024, tested it in its laboratory in Sweden and planned trials at Boliden's Aitik mine. ABB's Max Luedtke said the industry is on a trajectory towards automated and autonomous operations. We covered the robot in our post on EV charging robots, and ABB's underground robot for loading blast holes in mining explosive charging.

ABB's eMine Robot Automated Connection Device, a robot arm that plugs in electric mining trucks, at MINExpo 2024. Photo: ABB

What autonomous mining still has to solve

Factories are working on the same problem at a smaller scale. ABB's Flexley Mover P604 finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM, positions itself to within 10 mm, builds its own map of the workspace and shares it with the rest of the fleet, with no extra infrastructure needed. A haul truck fleet run from a control room works on the same principle over kilometres. Writing in International Mining on 22 October 2026, ABB's Björn Jonsson said that "autonomy is not a switch that we suddenly turn on. It is something we build towards."

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, an autonomous mobile robot that navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Homes feel this through the metals they use. Jonsson cites the IEA's expectation that demand for critical minerals will almost double by 2040 under current policies, with copper alone adding around 7 million tonnes, and a project pipeline that points to a possible 25 percent shortfall in copper supply by 2035. Existing mines will have to get more out of what they already have. At Bluestone's Renison tin mine in Tasmania, ABB is modernising a production hoist installed in the 1990s, a haulage system ABB describes as more energy efficient for deep mines than trucking.

An ABB engineer beside an underground winder drum, from ABB's release on modernising the hoist at the Renison Tin Mine in Tasmania. Photo: ABB

Mixed fleets are the hard part on site. Komatsu says mines still run graders, dozers, light vehicles and some manned machines alongside autonomous trucks, and the industry is pushing for autonomy that does not tie a mine to one truck brand. Money is another limit: ABB's own research found that 44 percent of industrial decision makers have equipment interruptions at least monthly, yet only 55 percent plan to modernise before problems arise. Caterpillar and Luck Stone say autonomy opens new skills and technology-focused roles for quarry staff, and AutoHaul still keeps drivers for backup and the final stretch into port.

The ABB Robot Charger on its carrier vehicle underground, with the arm reaching toward the rock face. Photo: ABB

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