Leading vehicle automation provider, ABD Solutions, has developed a new Mobile Supervisory System for its vehicle automation solution, Indigo Drive. It allows mining vehicles to be automated anywhere in the world without the need for existing infrastructure.
“Indigo Drive automates existing vehicle fleets, accelerating autonomy at a fraction of the cost of replacing the fleet with autonomous equivalents,” said Matthew Price, Managing Director of ABD Solutions. “Autonomous vehicles are revolutionising the mining industry by increasing efficiency, improving safety and reducing costs. Our new mobile solution is enabling these benefits to be extended across the entire mining operation, wherever it is in the world.”
The compact Mobile Supervisory System consists of the servers and operator stations that enable a site to manage its fleet of automated vehicles. It can be fitted into various configurations including a vehicle, such as a van, or a mobile container and can be placed in the most remote and hostile environments.
It acts as the operations centre for Indigo Drive, a technology ecosystem that enables a limitless number of mining vehicles to be quickly and cost-effectively automated. The secure system is IEC61508: 2010 and ISO17757: 2019 certified and includes a user-friendly software interface for route-planning, the hardware to move the vehicles (such as drive-by-wire and driving robots), communication (radio, V2X, GPS/GNSS), obstacle detection (LiDAR, camera, radar) and vehicle health and diagnostics (OBD2, telemetry, sensors). The system is completely modular and can be tailored around the specific vehicles and environments.
As a fully redundant high-availability system, the new Mobile Supervisory System ensures there is no single point of failure, providing a high level of reliability and continuous operation. The level of redundancy is scalable to meet the desired application.
Designed to operate in the most hostile of environments the mobile system is powered by hot-swappable lithium-ion battery packs providing 24 hours of operating life, or they can be recharged using solar power or hydrogen generators. The components are IP67 rated to prevent the ingress of dust and moisture making them highly ruggedised and spray washable.
ABD Solutions has developed a Mobile Supervisory System demonstrator van that contains everything needed for operators to supervise a fleet of Indigo Drive automated vehicles. It will be used to demonstrate the technology to prospective customers at their sites around Europe or at ABD Solutions’ test track in the UK.
