Wind River edge, announced Apr. 14 its collaboration with open-pit mining provider Beijing Tage Technology Co., which will develop a software platform for next-generation autonomous mining vehicles. They report the mining industry was an early adopter of fully autonomous vehicles and machinery to improve safety, increase productivity and save costs, and add that applying an autonomous haulage system will not only protect mining workers, but also improve the economic benefit to mining enterprises.
Tage has developed an autonomous haulage system solution based on an edge-to-cloud architecture, including an intelligent cloud platform, V2X telematics, and an intelligent, autonomous mining vehicle. The software powering this solution includes Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS), along with Tage’s central control unit (CCU) core algorithm module. The CCU in the autonomous vehicle domain controller is responsible for the implementation of core functions of autonomous mining vehicles, such as motion planning, vehicle control, and fault diagnosis. These functions have stringent requirements around the security, safety, and reliability of a system’s operation, as well as for real-time performance and deterministic task execution and switching, which Wind River software delivers.
Wind River and Tage also plan to work closely on developing environments and functional safety certifications to launch practical products and solutions. In addition, given the increasing compute demands of autonomous vehicles, the two companies will develop infrastructure software for next-generation mine vehicles, including advanced high-performance computing, V2X between vehicles and the infrastructure, and secure over-the-air (OTA) update technologies.
