Two driverless trucks involved in incident
Australian iron ore miner Fortescue said that one of its driverless trucks, traveling at low speed, ran into another that was parked at its remote Western Australian operations in an incident earlier this week.
No one was hurt or at risk of being injured in the Feb. 11 incident, the miner said in a statement. Fortescue has been retrofitting its extensive fleet of huge mining trucks with autonomous haulage systems (AHS) over the past several years.
“This was not the result of any failure of the autonomous system,” Fortescue Chief Executive Elizabeth Gaines said in the statement. The miner is conducting a full investigation into the incident.
“On Monday, 11 February an AHS truck made contact with a parked AHS truck at slow speed,” the statement said, without disclosing the speed at which the moving vehicle was traveling or details of any damage to the trucks. “No manned vehicles or people were involved.”
Fortescue said its AHS trucks have safely traveled more than 24.7 million kilometers since 2012.
