Product News: SafeAI and MACA partner for autonomous fleet

SafeAI and MACA announced a partnership to retrofit a fleet of 100 mixed vehicles. Together with SafeAI’s Australian partner, Position Partners, the companies will create one of the largest autonomous heavy equipment fleets in Australia, powering safer, more productive and more cost-effective mine sites, they claim. 

SafeAI has built an autonomous platform that brings the latest in artificial intelligence (AI) to heavy industry, they say. The company’s platform is interoperable and vehicle-agnostic, enabling mining and construction companies to retrofit any vehicle, from any manufacturer, with autonomous technology. With advanced multimodal sensors and onboard processing power, SafeAI-enabled equipment can independently make efficient, accurate decisions to keep operations running smoothly and safely, 24/7, the partners note.

“The mining industry has had autonomous equipment for more than twenty years—but we’ve gone as far as we can go with the first iteration of this technology,” said Bibhrajit Halder, founder and CEO of SafeAI. “SafeAI and MACA are going all in on the next generation of autonomy—a generation that is AI-powered, versatile and scalable to bring meaningful, widespread change to the mining industry.”

MACA needed a solution capable of scaling with its business. SafeAI’s interoperable retrofit technology unlocks newfound scalability and versatility by enabling the company to optimize its existing fleet, rather than forcing it to complete a highly time-consuming and costly transition to an entirely new fleet of autonomous vehicles, they say.  

“This technology is a game-changer for our business, our customers and our industry,” said Shane Clark, MACA’s general manager of estimating and technical services. “SafeAI’s versatile, scalable solution is unmatched in our industry right now, and has profound implications for site safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. We expect to see quick takeup from our customers as they begin to see the tremendous impact of this technology.” 

Through this partnership, SafeAI and Position Partners will work with MACA to retrofit its large, mixed fleet of haul trucks with autonomous hardware and software. MACA will be the first contract miner to deploy AI-powered autonomy for its customers, establishing safer, more productive and more cost-effective operations. 

“With SafeAI’s scalable, AI-powered technology, we can quickly deploy autonomous heavy equipment across our sites—creating safer, more productive operations and setting a new standard for our industry,” said Mike Sutton, CEO and managing director of MACA.