Recently, 40 Zoomlion ZT160HEV hybrid mining trucks equipped with CiDi’s autonomous driving system were successfully delivered to an unnamed coal mine in Xinjiang, China, reported Zhitong Finance. To date, CiDi has deployed over 120 unmanned trucks to the operation.
The delivery of these 40 autonomous trucks represents the outcome of deep collaboration and joint efforts between CiDi and Zoomlion. The Zoomlion ZT160HEV deeply integrates CIDI’s autonomous driving system and has officially been put into operation in stripping projects, achieving uninterrupted, highly efficient 24-hour operations.
Located in the heart of the Gobi Desert, the Xinjiang mine experiences winter temperatures as low as -30°C, which can cause sensor malfunctions, battery performance degradation, and delays in drive-by-wire system responses. Additionally, dust generated during mining operations severely obstructs visual sensors and LiDAR systems, directly affecting the precision of environmental recognition and posing severe challenges to the autonomous driving system.
To address the extreme cold, CiDi specifically upgraded hardware configurations, selecting low-temperature-resistant specialized sensors and core components paired with customized heating protection modules. This fundamentally resolved issues related to low-temperature adaptability at the hardware level, ensuring stable operation of critical components such as sensors and drive-by-wire systems even under extreme temperatures.
In response to dust interference, CiDi leveraged a multi-redundancy perception solution, integrating the complementary advantages of LiDAR, millimeter-wave radar, and visual sensors, supplemented by proprietary dust filtering algorithms. This effectively penetrates dust obstructions, noted the manufacturer, enabling precise identification of obstacles, work routes, and surrounding environments, and resolving perception challenges under adverse weather conditions.
More notably, CiDi successfully implemented large-scale cluster operations of unmanned vehicles at the mine. CiDi’s self-developed cluster dispatching system intelligently plans optimal driving routes for each mining truck based on real-time road conditions and task priorities within the mine. It dynamically coordinates vehicle interactions, including passing, yielding and loading/unloading processes, effectively preventing congestion.
Furthermore, the system supports multi-vehicle cooperative group driving, transmitting operation instructions through low-latency vehicle-to-vehicle communication, ensuring consistency and safety in fleet movement. Compared to traditional manual driving modes, cluster operations significantly reduce labor costs and safety risks while markedly improving transportation efficiency, according to CiDi.
Source: Zhitong Finance