A person in a three-tonne LandCruiser cannot feel what a 500-tonne haul truck feels. Yet for decades, that’s exactly how mining operations have judged the condition of the haul road, the dirt superhighway that carries every tonne a mine produces.
The industry calls it the bump test. Someone drives the circuit, decides where it feels rough, and the grader heads out on a hunch. Some sites add drone surveys, which capture a snapshot of the road perhaps twice a day and miss everything in between. On an asset that degrades under heavy traffic every single shift, a snapshot is stale before it reaches anyone’s desk.
The cost of that blind spot is enormous. Most haul truck tyres fail at just 40 to 60 per cent of their engineered life, and a single ultra-class tyre can cost up to $100,000. Rough surfaces force trucks to slow, and lost throughput can drain up to $10,000 an hour. Time is money in mining. The haul road quietly takes both.
What continuous haul road monitoring looks like
We built Decoda Detect to close that blind spot. We ruggedised high-definition LiDAR, edge processing and AI to survive the harshest operating environments on earth, from sub-zero Canadian pits to extreme Queensland heat, and mounted it on the production assets themselves. Every haul truck becomes a rolling survey instrument, scanning the road at half-metre intervals with 20 times the granularity of a traditional drone survey.
The road stops being an occasional guess and becomes a live data stream. Hazards show up the moment they appear, while the trucks keep hauling.
Detection is only half the job
Here’s the lesson that surprised us most: more data can make an operation worse. Site teams are already flooded with reports and heatmaps, with no spare capacity for another dashboard. So we distilled millions of data points into a single red or green alert in the cab, a decision an operator can make in a millisecond. Operator adoption reached 100 per cent.
Then we closed the loop completely. When a sensor identifies a hazard, our platform can automatically trigger a geo-fenced work order through the site’s existing fleet management system and dispatch the nearest maintenance crew. The fix gets made without a report ever landing on a supervisor’s desk. In one large-scale Queensland deployment, this approach cut tyre-damaging rock impacts by 60 per cent within four weeks.
The road ahead demands it
Autonomous trucks stop entirely when they sense undulations a human driver would shrug off. Battery-electric fleets bleed range on rough surfaces through rolling resistance. Both depend on near-perfect roads. Continuous haul road monitoring is the sensory infrastructure that underwrites the autonomous, low-emission mine of the future, and the operations that adopt it now will be ready when that future arrives.
A proud milestone for our team
We’re delighted to share that Decoda is an official entrant in The CEO Magazine’s The Innovators program. The nomination recognises the thinking and the engineering behind our approach to haul road monitoring, and we’re honoured to be in the running alongside businesses reimagining their industries.
Our thanks go to our engineering team, whose operational empathy turned a hard technical problem into something a truck operator can act on in a millisecond, to our partners Kal Tire and TECWISE, who carried our technology to 150 mine sites across 19 countries, and to the customers who trusted a new idea over a familiar habit.
Where to from here
If your operation still relies on a bump test or a twice-daily snapshot, your haul road is holding answers you can’t yet hear. We’d love to show you what it has to say. Get in touch with our team to see how continuous road condition intelligence works on a real circuit.
The best mines of the next decade will run on roads that talk. We intend to keep listening.
