Mining Technology

Take a Closer Look at Minestar Edge

Learn more about the features and benefits that help you get the most out of your investment and your operation:

• Equipment Tracking
  • Provides information on all mobile assets, from the loading and hauling fleet to non-production machines like water trucks, dozers, graders, drills, light vehicles and more — no matter the manufacturer.
  • Consistently provides a basic level of information on all assets, including data on locations and movements, velocity, payload, cycle times and fuel level, as well as Service Meter Readings and time utilization.
  • Replaces pencil and paper with accurate recording, helping supervisors better understand utilization and make decisions about equipment investments and effectiveness.
  • Allows users to drill down to see the performance of entities such as individual machines, areas, routes, materials and operators.
  • Enables sites to review production records from the point of view of the material transaction and movement from the load face to the dump, including the times, machines and operators involved.
• Production Recording
  • When paired with Equipment Tracking, delivers an accurate and automated near-real-time solution that measures and reports on every aspect of the load-haul-dump cycle without requiring any operator input.
  • Delivers high-accuracy data recording, reducing downstream errors when the position is referenced for automatic collection of information.
  • Provides the ability to replay shifts in great detail, helping sites answer Production Recording questions and providing information for incident investigation and material tracking
  • Automatically measures time when the equipment is not being productive and will attempt to classify with a machine-learning approach, reducing or eliminating missed or incorrect time measuring and giving operations information they can use to measure and manage their processes—specifically those that have production loss impacts.
  • Helps sites measure and manage equipment downtime and classify it as scheduled or unscheduled, providing a key indication of the effectiveness of the site’s maintenance and reliability programs, which can reduce downtime and lead to improved productivity.
  • Allows operations to better manage and measure equipment operators, including allocating them to machines and tracking performance, and provides operators with KPIs about their personal performance—helping operators improve and leading to a more consistent operation and reduced cost per tonne.
  • Integrates with Cat Water Delivery System (WDS) offering saturation visualization, replay capability, and data reporting
• Surface Management
  • Helps sites measure, manage and ultimately optimize the attributes of all areas where machines and vehicles travel and work, including roads, dumps and load areas.
  • Provides improved knowledge of surface design conformance to drive more responsive work instructions and assignments — allowing for optimal maintenance and excavation of surfaces and haul roads.
  • Combines planning and material information created in the office with information provided by machines to enable the precise execution of the mine plan.
  • Automatically generates a fused digital model that incorporates multiple sources to provide a 3D visualization of virtual and augmented reality, including benches, roads, dumps, berms and stockpiles, displays patterns, blocks in progress and as-built surfaces.
  • Monitors progress and helps mines plan, execute and maintain site compliance to spatial — in real time.
  • Provides timeline advance and comparison reporting and enables the ability to swipe to previous or future.
  • Provides volume calculation and tonnes vs. survey reconciliation.
• Guide
  • Combines advanced guidance tools, instant operator feedback and real-time progress reporting to help ensure that grading and loading operations run safely, consistently and according to plan.
  • Utilizes the advanced capabilities of the Edge platform to provide the next generation of high-precision tracking and guidance for grading and loading operations, using the most advanced GNSS technology to increase machine productivity and provide real-time feedback for improved efficiency.
  • Provides high-precision block and material identification automatically to the operator and operations, which allows for improved dilution management.
  • Automatically sends grade, block and material designs to the machine and operator based on location, which ensures compliance to plan and ultimately boosts productivity and reduces rework.
  • Eliminates the need for survey stakes and reduces dependency on surveyors in the field.
• Scalability & Affordability
  • Delivered as a cloud-based, subscription-managed application, lowering network requirements as well as associated costs of deployment, service and training.
  • Does not require mines to invest capital in servers and database solutions that are sometimes required with mining technology solutions.
  • Speeds the time from order to use, and allows automatic upgrades, updates and fixes.
  • Provides option to have some applications hosted locally to ensure higher connectivity and less latency.
  • Provides ability to start small and scale up to a full operational ecosystem, allowing operations of every size and type to more easily take advantage of the benefits technology makes possible.
• Integration
  • Is designed as part of Cat MineStar, a system that is used and supported around the world on thousands of machines.
  • Shares data seamlessly with other Cat MineStar technologies.
• Sustainability
  • Delivers consistent and more efficient operations to reduce fuel usage, which translates to a reduction in emissions.
  • Enables higher machine utilization, for reductions in idle time and less wasted fuel.
  • Incorporates machine health technologies and data analytics to maximize asset health and performance, reducing waste.