Every ultra-class haul truck tyre costs up to $100,000. Most mines will damage several this year and never trace the cause back to where it actually started: the road itself.
For decades, the haul road has been the most overlooked asset on any open-pit site. Production teams watch cycle times. Maintenance teams watch tyre wear. Almost nobody watches the surface that both of those numbers depend on.
We built RockAware to close that gap, and the results are proving out one of the most expensive problems in heavy haulage: premature tyre failure.
A road nobody was actually watching
Traditional haul road management relies on a light vehicle doing a subjective inspection, or a drone scanning the surface once or twice a week at ten metre intervals. Neither method captures what happens under a loaded 400 tonne truck. Sharp rock spillage and rutting go unnoticed until a tyre is already damaged, and by then the cost is locked in.
RockAware changes what watching the road actually means. Mounted directly on active haul trucks, it combines LiDAR, high definition cameras and edge AI processing to read the surface at half metre granularity, twenty times more detailed than a drone pass. Onboard algorithms process every reading locally and deliver an alert in under five seconds, converting complex telemetry into one simple signal in the cab: red or green.
From alert to action, automatically
Detection on its own doesn’t fix a road. RockAware closes the loop by translating every confirmed hazard into a precise, geo-fenced work order sent straight to grader dispatch through the site’s fleet management system. Maintenance crews stop circling the whole haul circuit hunting for problems and start heading straight to the hotspot causing the damage.
Sites running RockAware are seeing a 60% reduction in tyre-rock impact collisions and a 20% extension in overall tyre life, worth up to $200,000 per truck every year. Trucks are also spending more time working, with a 4% lift in availability, a 3 to 5% cut in haul cycle times, and an 8 to 12% drop in fuel burn.
Every tyre we save is one less buried on site
Mining recovers less than 5% of off-the-road tyres. Left unmanaged, that’s over 100,000 tonnes of rubber and steel buried on mine sites every year. Extending tyre life by 20% keeps more than 15,000 tonnes of that waste out of the ground annually, which makes RockAware as much an environmental result as an operational one.
If your haul circuit is losing tonnes to hazards nobody can see until it’s too late, reach out to our team. We’ll show you what half metre visibility looks like on your site.
