SOURCE: Mining Magazine | November 18, 2024
Aptella sources, deploys and supports a range of intelligent positioning, geospatial and high-precision machine guidance automation systems for the mining industry. These high-performance product solutions serve to enhance productivity, seamlessly integrating hardware systems with sophisticated software platforms, allowing for more efficient analysis, monitoring and design.
Bespoke, integrated solutions
Aptella product manager, Denzil Khan, said he sees training of personnel as central to gleaning optimal productivity and efficiency enhancements from Aptella’s systems, with the ability to understand and interpret the data generated key to delivering premium outcomes.
In this way, the company ensures its customers are provided with select real-time data necessary to optimise productivity and efficiency, as opposed to being swamped by all the data generated.
Aptella takes the view it is only by understanding customers’ pain points that solutions can be customised to the operation at hand, as opposed to out-of-the-box responses that would struggle to deliver improvements. System outputs can then be tailored to ensure they align with the operational workflow and the site’s key performance metrics.
As to that which elevates Aptella, Khan highlights points of difference across the board in respect of support, configuration, deployment and innovation, since the multifaceted solutions the company is synonymous with extend beyond provision of the technology itself to a longer-term partnership. As he explained, “whether it be networking, global navigation satellite, fleet management, or safety solutions, we are able to ensure that all of these platforms come together in a central location, supported through a single entity.”
The best of Aptella
In terms of an innovation introduced to the market that pays testament to Aptella’s pioneering credentials in the automated mine space, Khan pointed to the company’s towable multimodal trailer. This drag and drop solution can be deployed anywhere, anytime, bringing access to all the systems a mine may require.
And while the Aptella product manager acknowledged that permanent infrastructure will be the best long-term solution for the customer, given that this would typically take several weeks or months to establish, the multimodal trailer works to minimise downtime, allowing mining companies to increase productivity and efficiency, and immediately realise the value of the technology.
As to ongoing developments at Aptella, Khan is especially excited about the work the company is doing around autonomous solutions. For, although tier one mining companies have used such technologies for decades, the contract mining market remains relatively unschooled in the profound advantages autonomisation can bring in terms of productivity and efficiency. He singled out Aptella’s ability to retrofit an autonomous haulage solution on to a haul truck in partnership with SafeAI as an exemplar of how to successfully introduce a new solution into a new market.
Khan also spoke of Aptella’s vision to automate dozers and drills on these mine sites for productivity, fleet utilisation and operational safety wins. Not only does this see the operator removed from harm’s way thanks to semi-remote, semi-autonomous or remote-controlled systems, but it allows for the operation of multiple units in parallel using minimal labour resources.
Another technology solution that is making waves in the mining sector is the HubX mobile payload platform for autonomous scanning and mapping. Distributed by Aptella, it is designed for use in remote and hard-to-access locations, and is deployable in as little as 30 minutes. From a surveying perspective, this is a game changer, since it allows one team of surveyors to monitor many sites across a country. It also has numerous applications, such as ensuring indigenous areas are not disturbed, or understanding where mining tenement boundaries may be.
Khan also drew attention to Aptella’s use of Rajant’s kinetic wireless mesh networks, which underpins much of its work. Rajant is the global market leader in this field with its technology used in over 300 mines in more than 80 countries.
This highly reliable mesh networking solution allows data to travel to and from the machines across a mine site. From there, additional technologies such as the SafeAI autonomous haulage solution are bolted on, utilising the network where possible. However, when the network is unavailable, or there is no coverage in a particular area, SafeAI can use the AI component to work out where it needs to go and how it needs to get there.
Armed with the knowledge that the truck will definitely reach the excavator during its cycle, and with the excavator similarly equipped with machine guidance and fleet management technology, the operator now knows exactly where, what, and how much to dig, as well as the time spent loading and waiting. At the same time, any maintenance issues that appeared during the cycle are communicated through the Rajant network back to the office. And it is this ability to blend all these technologies under one banner that distinguishes Aptella.
Partner for life
Aptella’s ethos is rooted in the concept of ‘thinking global acting local’, in which technologies and support capabilities transcend borders, yet with specific solutions informed by regional market idiosyncrasies.
However, regardless of where a company is located, how big it is, or what its agenda is, Aptella constitutes the perfect long-term partner to forge ever more efficient pathways, according to Denzil Khan.
“We have the most comprehensive group of solutions at the most competitive price points, with the most exhaustive list of features and functionalities,” he concluded.
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