Key Takeaways

  • Autonomous and semi-autonomous blast-hole drill rigs — Epiroc Pit Viper and Sandvik AutoMine — are the current commercial reality of “advanced drilling.”
  • Autonomous drilling achieves roughly ±5 cm positioning accuracy at planned collar locations, versus roughly ±30 cm for conventional manned drilling.
  • Utilization rates for autonomous rigs run 85–90%, compared with 55–65% for manned rigs — the productivity case is well-documented, not speculative.
  • Onboard measurement-while-drilling (MWD) sensing on these rigs overlaps with — and can feed into — probe-based systems like BLASTDOG.
  • This category is still Emerging in the sense that full-fleet autonomy is a recent, actively-expanding capability rather than a decade-old standard.

TL;DR

“Advanced drilling” today means autonomous blast-hole rigs (Epiroc Pit Viper, Sandvik AutoMine) running onboard navigation and MWD sensing to hit collar positions far more precisely and consistently than manned drilling — this is real, deployed, and expanding, not a future promise.

How Do I Automate Advanced Drilling With AI?

The AI/automation layer in production drilling sits in the rig’s onboard control system, not as a separate software product you bolt on. Epiroc’s Pit Viper line has run autonomous trials for roughly a decade — starting at a Pilbara iron ore operation and since expanding to dozens of sites across copper, gold, platinum, and phosphate — using Epiroc’s Rig Control System to handle tramming, positioning, and drilling without an operator in the cab. The reported numbers are worth internalizing when you’re building the business case: autonomous rigs hit collar positions within about ±5 cm of plan, versus roughly ±30 cm for manned drilling, and run at 85–90% utilization versus 55–65% manned. Sandvik extended its established underground AutoMine automation platform into surface drill-and-blast with AutoMine Surface Fleet, bringing the same fleet-automation philosophy that’s been proven underground for years into open-pit blast-hole drilling.

Practically, adopting this means procuring autonomy-capable rigs from these vendors (it’s not typically a retrofit onto arbitrary existing equipment) and building the supporting infrastructure — geofencing, remote operations center, and onboard MWD/navigation data pipelines. The MWD sensing on these rigs is a natural complement to probe-based systems like BLASTDOG: the rig gives you positioning precision and drilling-parameter data, while a probe gives you post-hole rock-property data, and together they feed a much richer picture of the bench than either alone.

Call this Emerging rather than fully mature: the underlying autonomous-drilling technology is proven and commercially deployed, but full-fleet, site-wide autonomy is still expanding rather than a decade-old default at most operations — expect a real integration and change-management effort, not a plug-and-play upgrade.

Try It With Geocluster

Autonomous drill data is another data stream that’s only as valuable as the modelling pipeline it feeds — precise collar positions and MWD logs matter most when they’re reconciled against your geological and geotechnical models. Geocluster is built to help connect these operational data streams into your broader geological research workflow. Take a look on GitHub.