Dredge Robotics hire: tailings dredging risk and operations lens for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Dredge Robotics has appointed former Orica and Thiess executive Roy Andrich as operations director to scale its remotely operated dredging and dewatering services for tailings storage facilities and process ponds. Andrich brings more than 25 years’ experience in blasting, contract mining and large-scale project delivery, including managing multi-million-dollar drill-and-blast and load-and-haul fleets across Australian coal and iron ore operations. The move signals a push to expand deployment of submersible dredging robots in high-risk, soft-ground tailings environments where conventional earthmoving plant cannot safely operate.
Technical Brief
- Submersible dredging robots keep operators off soft, potentially liquefiable tailings beaches and pond margins.
- Remote operation removes personnel from exposure to overtopping, slope instability and suction entrapment hazards.
- Robotics-based dredging reduces interaction between floating pipelines, pumps and conventional mobile plant in congested TSF zones.
- Continuous underwater dredging limits the need for drawdown or trafficable access, reducing cracking and desiccation risks.
- Standardised robotic operating envelopes and exclusion zones simplify integration with site critical controls and permit-to-work systems.
- Digital telemetry from the robots enables live monitoring of porewater levels, turbidity and equipment loads for safety triggers.
Our Take
Among the 1082 Mining stories in our database, Australia is heavily represented in 'Safety' and 'Product' tags, suggesting Dredge Robotics is operating in a market where mine operators are already primed to trial remote and automated equipment.
The combination of 'Projects' and 'Safety' tags without a specific commodity indicates Dredge Robotics is positioning itself as a cross-commodity service provider in Australia, which typically shortens sales cycles because solutions can be justified on risk reduction rather than ore-price economics.
With no mines or assets named, this move looks less tied to a single project and more like a scale-up play in the Australian services space, where we see several firms using senior hires to pivot from bespoke project work to repeatable product-based offerings.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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