Space Technology Run Australia’s Mining Miracle

The heavy clank of machinery rings out across a seemingly deserted Outback mine site as an invisible satellite signal fires Rio Tinto’s production line into motion.
Massive stackers and reclaimers begin the task of sifting through rust-coloured piles of rich iron ore, readying them for the rail journey hundreds of kilometres from mine to port.
It’s an industrious scene — with hardly a living being in sight.
“People frequently ask whether we have anyone working here at all,” one miner at Rio’s Dampier operations told AFP.
“Due to automation and stuff most people are pretty well tucked away from the heat. There’s not a lot of manual workers.”
Automation has long been a part of the mining industry, but advances in satellite, motion-sensor technology and robotics have made the stuff of science fiction a fact of everyday life.
Machines which scoop the ore, dump it on a conveyor belt and hose it down are now controlled from the air-conditioned comfort of Rio Tinto’s Perth operations centre, 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) away from the arid mine pit.
Hundreds of specially trained operators who once directed machines from on-site offices watch and direct the action from afar using satellite technology, with surveillance cameras feeding into some 440 monitors.
Once fully operational — currently scheduled for June — the operations centre will allow all of Rio’s rail, mine and port systems to be coordinated from one place.
Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto is one of the world’s biggest mining companies, with aluminium, copper, diamonds, gold and iron ore among its major products.
“Process plants have long been managed from a console — it’s just as if this task is now performed with a much, much longer extension cord,” Rio said in its latest innovations update.
“But never before, on anything like this scale, has the huge number of tasks been accomplished in full view and full knowledge of everyone else involved.”
The operations centre in Perth is central to Rio’s “Mine of the Future” programme, which aims for driverless trucks and trains, and sensor-fitted “smart drills” that can be operated remotely.
Since December 2008 it has been trialling automation technologies at a test site called “A-Pit”, where robotic trucks with artificial intelligence “learn” the layout of the mine and use sensors to sense and avoid obstacles.
Australian government scientists are working closely with the mining industry, drawing inspiration from space exploration to troubleshoot, explains researcher Ian Gipps.
“It sounds crazy but quite a few of the problems in space and in remote mining can be similar,” said Gipps, from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
“You don’t necessarily want to have people there… so a lot of exploration on planets requires automated and remote operating systems, particularly automated.”
Current research was focusing on the use of robots fixed with radar and light-spectrum technology to detect and gauge the quality of minerals, he added. It could be available in as little as two years.
“We want to be able to put sensors on machines that can look at the (rock) face and say, ‘the ore’s on one half of the face and not the other half of the face and the ore’s of a particular grade’,” Gipps said.
“You can’t just take a sample and send it off to a lab and get it back in 24 hours or 48 hours and say, ‘ok, we want to mine that area’. We want to know that within a couple of seconds of being there,” said Gipps.
The shift to automation is not without its challenges — chief among them securing vast satellite networks against cyber-attacks — but Gipps said it was critical to addressing chronic labour shortages.
“If the industry wants to keep on advancing then it has to make employment more attractive,” he said.
In the cyclone-prone and brutally hot Pilbara, the “A-Pit” trial is due to finish later this year. Its findings will form the basis for an operations-wide rollout of remote and driverless technologies.
Chief executive Tom Albanese hopes to position Rio as the world’s most technologically advanced mining company, describing it as key to the company’s ambitions to boost annual iron ore production above 600 million tonnes.
“Rio Tinto is changing the face of mining,” he said at the Mine of the Future’s 2008 launch.
But will humans ever be removed entirely from the equation? Gipps is sceptical.
“A lot of the challenge is getting machines to understand what’s happening around them,” he said. “It’s remarkable how clever a human is in doing that.”

Yahoo ,Google Criticize Australian Internet Filter

Internet giants Google and Yahoo have criticized Australia’s proposal for a mandatory Internet filter, calling it a heavy-handed measure that could restrict access to legal information.
Their statements, among 174 comments from the public submitted to the Department of Communications on the filtering proposal, come amid a struggle between Google and China over censorship-free content.
Lucinda Barlow of Google Australia on Wednesday called the Internet blocking measures of Australia and China “apples and oranges” but said her company was deeply concerned about Australia’s proposal because of its mandatory and sweeping nature.
Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the filter would block access to sites that include child pornography, sexual violence and detailed instructions in crime or drug use. The list of banned sites could be constantly updated based on public complaints.
If adopted into law, the screening system would make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among the world’s democracies, and the proposal has put the country on the Reporters Without Borders annual “Enemies of the Internet” list.
“Our primary concern is that the scope of content to be filtered is too wide,” Google wrote in its submission, also suggesting the filter would slow browsing speeds.
The company said it already had its own filter to block child pornography.
“Some limits, like child pornography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available — and we agree,” Google said. “But moving to a mandatory ISP level filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy-handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.”
Google’s Barlow told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the proposal raised the possibility of banning politically and socially controversial material and went beyond filters used in Germany and Canada, which block child pornography and, in Italy, gambling sites.
Yahoo made a similar contention, saying the filter would block many sites with controversial content — such as euthanasia discussion forums and gay and lesbian forums that discuss sexual experiences.
“There is enormous value in this content being available to encourage debate and inform opinion,” Yahoo said.
The filter would not block peer-to-peer file-sharing nor prevent predators approaching children in chat programs or social networking sites, and both Google and Yahoo backed a national campaign to educate parents and children about safe use of the Internet.
Comments on the proposal came from Australian telecommunication companies, lobby groups and individuals. Conroy said his department would take the comments into consideration before sending a proposal to Parliament later this year.
The discussion over Internet restrictions in Australia comes as Google is battling online censorship in China.
Google said last month it would stop censoring searches for the Chinese government, and this week began routing searches through Hong Kong. In response, the communist government has blocked people on the mainland from seeing search results or Web sites dealing with such forbidden topics as the pro-democracy movement.
David Vaile of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales said China and Australia had markedly different approaches to restricting the Internet.
“China’s filter is explicitly about discouraging access to and discussion of certain clearly political topics,” he said, while Australia’s filter would focus on specifically restricted material.
While some critics of Australia’s filter have said it puts the nation in the same censorship league as China, Vaile pointed out that the freedom-of-speech argument used by American companies follows a legal tradition that other countries do not necessarily share.
Yahoo and Google are accustomed to the protections of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and elevates it to a very high legal status, Vaile said.
“In Australia there is no equivalent,” Vaile said. “There is no law that says you’ve got free speech. Having a lack of any legal protection for free speech for any effective restraint on (filters) is something that’s worrying.”