Dredge Robotics has added a new string to its bow, with the recovery of valuable minerals complementing its liner-safe dredging capability.
The upkeep of lined ponds is an important but sometimes overlooked process on a mine site.
Mine operators have an obligation to hold storage in their lined pond as part of their mining license. If it gets to the point that they have limited or zero storage available, they could be violating their license and require a quick fix.
Enter Dredge Robotics.
Mining companies across Australia have turned to Dredge Robotics for a range of services, with the heavy dredging of lined ponds key among them.
Dredge’s patented robotic technology can, while operations remain online, safely dredge ponds back to bare liner, enabling these critical facilities to look like new again.
“Our robots can access all areas of lined ponds,” Dredge Robotics chief executive officer Antony Old told Australian Mining. “It doesn’t matter what commodity you’ve got in there, be it coal, lithium, nickel, lead or gold, the machine can safely traverse the pond without damaging it.
“The robot can not only clean the pond for you, but it can also recover valuable minerals that have been naturally discarded during mineral processing.”
This application has proven valuable to miners of various commodities, including gold.
“When deposited, gold, being a heavy metal, tends to fall to the bottom of the pond and aggregate immediately above the liner,” Old said. “As our dredging robot goes to work collecting mud and safely cleaning the pond, it can also collect any discarded minerals.”
On some jobs, Old said Dredge has recovered millions of dollars’ worth of gold from lined ponds.
“Ponds can be a blind spot for lost gold and lost minerals,” he said.
“A miner digs up ore, which is then crushed, screened and processed, but before the material gets to the tailings facility, there’s typically a lined pond in the middle somewhere.
“Material enters the pond before being discarded to tailings, which means valuable minerals not picked up during processing can end up in a lined pond.”
Dredge has also helped lithium and lead miners recover lost minerals deposited in lined ponds, with a nickel project ongoing.
Artificial intelligence
As Dredge Robotics grows, with the company recently surpassing 100 employees, its technology is also expanding through the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).
“The primary focus of the machines for liner-safe dredging is to recover material from lined ponds and free up space for clients,” Old said.
“Sometimes those environments might have a challenging liquor, like high or low pH, and sometimes there might be complicating factors, with some clients dealing with stringent regulator control or compromised liners.
“The technology must be able to reliably navigate those challenges and still remove the product at a rate that’s economical. This has seen us add new features into the robots so they can do more complicated things.
“In order to tie together new functions, we’ve created a unified software platform that can be integrated with third-party programming, providing a seamless operating system for the pilots and the entire Dredge organisation.”
Old said Dredge pilots and employees can log into an app and monitor the progress of active dredging operations, with insights made available to clients.
“AI has opened new doors to be able to process big data really quickly in real time,” he said. “And we’re putting our developments into practice, with our AI-led control systems now entering real-world environments, with fantastic results achieved so far.
“We’re able to easily pattern and integrate new hardware, software and capabilities into our machines and automate functionality, so that if we want to make the machine repeat a pattern, or make it respond in a certain way, depending on what the environment is doing, we now can.”
Never has the Australian mining sector needed to be more environmentally conscious, with past events underpinning tightened regulations and a new era of environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards.
This has seen Dredge Robotics step in and become an important partner for mine operators, enabling new technologies to blossom and a new circular economy to be implemented.
This feature appeared in the June 2025 issue of Australian Mining.
