Caterpillar Inc., the manufacturer of bright yellow mining trucks, bulldozers, and graders, has pioneered self-driving, remote-controlled mining equipment on Earth. Some of that technology may find a home on the Moon, reports CNBC.
The company’s R&D autonomous-vehicle R&D efforts data back to 1985. By the 1990s, Caterpillar had two autonomous hauling trucks running at a Texas quarry. The industry wasn’t ready for autonomy at the time, but Caterpillar stuck to its strategy. Its patience paid off. Today, Zion Market Research indicates that the global mining automation market will double to more than $6 billion in 2025. Writes CNBC:
Caterpillar is leading the autonomy revolution with both its vehicles and operational software. “We now have seven customers and we’re on 11 different sites,” Johnson said, “mining oil sands, iron ore, copper and gold and soon coal.” Cat has deployed 220 of its own trucks, both brand-new autonomous vehicles — costing from $3.5 million to $5 million each — and existing ones that have been retrofitted.
“We’re also converting competitors’ trucks,” Johnson said. “Our solution needs to be interoperable. It’s a competitive decision we don’t take lightly, because we recognize there are other [autonomy] providers.”
The idea of extracting mineral resources and propelling them back to Earth is far-fetched. Likewise, the economics of manufacturing the equipment on Earth and transporting it to the Moon don’t look promising. The logistics still need to be worked out. But Caterpillar is in the game for the long haul. It waited years for a market to emerge for autonomous vehicles on Earth, and it’s willing to wait years for a market to materialize in space. In the meantime, it continues its research and sponsors NASA’s annual Robotic Mining Competition, in which more than 45 collegiate teams design and build remote-controlled mining robots to traverse a simulated Martian terrain.