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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Gecko’s Toka 5 robot and AI-powered operating platform can support predictive maintenance at mines. Credit: Gecko Robotics. Robots integrated with AI are a way of ensuring that mines get “the right data” to help optimise performance, says Jake Loosararian, the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics.Gecko, which uses AI-powered data from robots to help maintain critical infrastructure, recently entered an agreement with mining giant Freeport-McMoRan, the world’s largest copper producer, which had an output of 1.9 million tonnes (mt) in 2023. Freeport currently operates ten mines in the US, two in South America and three in Indonesia, according to GlobalData. As with other copper producers, it is facing challenges with decreasing head grades, which requires an “increasing need for efficiency”.Announcing Freeport’s collaboration with Gecko at the FT Mining Summit in September, Bill Cobb, the company’s vice-president and chief sustainability officer, pointed to the role of data science and technology such as automated systems and digital twins in improving mining processes and reducing cost.“We collect a lot of data across the pits — [from] all the haulage equipment, the drills, the shovels, etc — and in the processing facilities. We employ a lot of data science, and we are talking about innovation and the potential to reinvent what we do.”Cobb said that Bagdad, Freeport’s open-pit copper and molybdenum mine in Phoenix, Arizona, “will become the first autonomous hardware operation in the US next year”, adding that the company is evaluating what this will mean for mills and other operations.Why use robotics and AI for predictive maintenance?Loosararian, who founded Gecko Robotics from his college dorm room in 2013, reflects on his original mission “to build robotics and software to diagnose and help the world”.The main challenge, he tells Mining Technology, is that for many facilities usable data “simply doesn’t exist”. This is because historically – and oftentimes today – inspections are conducted manually, potentially leading to inconsistent or incomplete datasets.“AI tightens our sensitivity to data fidelity, ensuring that we have the right source of information/data to build systems,” Loosararian says.“Robots are our way of ensuring that we get the right data to ensure safety, efficiency, longevity and optimal performance at these facilities.”Gecko deploys various inspection robots, from wall-climbers to drones and robotic dogs, to assess the health of assets and to “figure out what they look like in reality”. It also obtains information from fixed sensors, which when combined with the historical
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