I am excited to announce that Hexagon’s autonomous mission management system won the Mining Magazine 2021 Fleet and Equipment award. What great recognition of the hard work by the autonomous development team and technology leadership in moving toward Hexagon’s autonomous vision for the mining industry. This marks the second award in four years that Hexagon has won for autonomous technology.
No vision of mining’s autonomous future can be fully realized without the technology to manage fleet and equipment. Hexagon’s autonomous mission management system is the beating heart of this vision, and the key to advancing the next generation of mine automation.
Launched in partnership with Liebherr at last year’s MINExpo in Las Vegas, the autonomous mission management system – or mission manager, for short – orchestrates autonomous fleet and unmanned mine traffic movements throughout the mine for optimized autonomous haulage. It is fully integrated with Hexagon’s fleet management and enterprise analytics and reporting portfolio products.
In many ways this reminds me of classic one-hit wonder bands versus groups whose second albums build and grow from a great musical base. Winning the 2017 Mining Magazine Safety award, my technology partner, Fabien Kritter, launched mining’s first vehicle braking system, HxGN MineProtect Vehicle Intervention System (VIS). My team has since deployed VIS across three continents, 10 mines and nearly 500 haul trucks with more than two million operational hours. That was a Billboard number one single for mining technology, in my opinion.
Following this up with the autonomous mission management system proves the first success was not by accident – no one-hit wonder. We followed the strategy that made VIS a success; being OEM independent but working directly with OEMs like Liebherr to develop the system; listening to customers to innovate; building towards ISO and other standards with our OEM and customer partners to ensure a more future-proofed solution; thinking about usability, scalability, state-of-the-art and next-generation technologies; ultimately delivering technology worthy of Mining Magazine’s 2021 Fleet and Equipment award
I credit Fabien for his vision and the Hexagon development team for achieving it. Credit is also due to Liebherr and customer partners for helping test the technology in real-world operation, and to the deep Power of One technology stack within Hexagon to facilitate this relatively fast development from concept to execution.
Thank you.