Mariana Minerals is the world’s first software-first mining company, using rich data sources from the field to optimize their operations. They are deploying Spot at their Copper One facility in Utah to help capture the data they need, automating routine inspections and reducing strain on operators in the field.

Transcript

Lukas Fahle, Mining Autonomy Lead: Mariana Minerals is really the only software first mining company. It’s really about bringing sensor solutions that are deployed in the field into our software framework that we’re using to store the data, analyze the data, make it visible to operators, and then act on that data to make better decisions to optimize our operations process.

Copper One is our facility here close to Moab, Utah. We’re extracting ore from a sedimentary host body and then crushing and putting that on a leach pad, extracting copper ore and refining into ninety nine percent pure copper cathode that then gets sold to our customers.

I first heard about Spot when I was in college actually getting my PhD. I was working on, lidar scanning solutions in underground mines and, pretty quickly came across, Spot as a robotic solution that would be able to carry that payload and collect that data.

I think the primary application when we start out is going to be doing inspections across the plant that currently take quite a bit of time of our operators to walk the plant. What we really hope to do is relieve those operators of these fairly tedious tasks and help them get more time back to do more value add tasks.

Alex Legrismith, Mining Engineer: One of the biggest things in mining is keeping people away from hazards. If you can physically remove somebody from the hazardous area instead of just using PPE or guards, it’s better to just not have the person in the dangerous area in the first spot. And this starts to pull people back from that and lets people work at a higher level.

Fahle: Once Spot is fully deployed, I’m really most excited about all the use cases that our teams, our operators can identify on-site that we haven’t even really thought about yet.

The teams that do these jobs every single day, they will see exactly what Spot could be good at and great at. They will give us a lot of ideas that we can then utilize and figure out what are the most value add use cases.

We’ve already met a bunch of our operators while we’re here on-site with Spot, and you can see the excitement when we come up with the Spot solutions. So I’m really optimistic that we’re gonna have a lot of great, cool ideas coming from our crews that we can utilize in the future.