How autonomous vehicles are changing oilsands mining

The climate of mining is changing, with more companies expanding their automated fleets. That's where companies like Sudbury's Epiroc come in. And one of their methods might surprise you. What's more popular in the industry is retrofitting existing vehicles to be semi-autonomous or tele-remote. So it's a scalable system that would be remote with the primary objective of getting an operator out of harm's way. And companies like Suncor have announced they're expanding their fleets. The growth with autonomous vehicles in the mining or the oil sands industry in the last 10 years or so has been exponentially growing. In this promotional video, you can see the company's first autonomous operating zone. Suncor has 19 trucks in the area, with plans to grow that number to 70. Oil sands operations can be deadly, with huge vehicles and dangerous terrain. But one researcher based in the United States says he hasn't found a single fatality linked to using automated vehicles in mining. If the automated truck is involved in an accident, no human being dies. The machine, we may lose the machine. But no human being will die, and that is very, very significant because we can replace the machine, but we cannot replace the human being. Despite those positive signs, there are fears the move towards automation will cost jobs. Even though the numbers of jobs, it hasn't been a catastrophic loss in number, but it has been a big loss in terms of the quality of those jobs. He says people are reallocated, but not necessarily to jobs that pay as well. At NAIT, a researcher in industrial automation has been working on a project that diagnoses problems with autonomous trucks without the need for a human. It takes the actual image, any damage or anything underneath chassis, otherwise you need to send people underneath the truck in the cold minus 40 so it's a quite a you know difficult terrain and also we have other sensors and everything which are giving other information of the truck So all together, it's a comprehensive inspection system and we do it in few minutes That technology has been sent to a third party for commercialization. It's a very good business case for this autonomy, and specifically for Alberta. It's a future paradigm shift that the companies must walk, maybe slowly, but intelligently, and ensure that they are not left behind. With machines being controlled by humans sometimes hundreds of kilometers away, the dynamics of mining are changing. And it's not only Suncor pursuing this technology in the industry. Jamie Malbeth, CBC News, Fort McMurray.