EACON autonomy at Mulgarrie: retrofit haul truck lessons for mine engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
EACON Mining Technology has begun fully autonomous testing of a retrofitted Komatsu HD1500 haul truck operating without a safety driver at Norton Gold Fields’ Mulgarrie open-pit mine in Western Australia. The tri-partite project with Thiess and Norton Gold involves converting an existing mechanical-drive fleet rather than deploying factory-built autonomous trucks, targeting lower capex and faster deployment on brownfield haul roads. Engineers will be watching interaction with manned fleets, traffic management rules, and system performance under variable pit geometries and blast conditions.
Technical Brief
- Project learnings are expected to inform retrofit autonomy roll-outs on other legacy mechanical-drive fleets.
Our Take
The related December 2025 item on the first fully autonomous Komatsu HD1500 cycle at Norton Gold Fields indicates Mulgarrie is one of the earliest Australian gold operations where EACON’s system has run without a safety driver, signalling a relatively advanced autonomy maturity compared with most gold mines in our database.
EACON’s parallel rollout of an on‑board perception‑centric haulage system in China suggests that lessons from higher‑volume Chinese fleets could quickly inform software updates at Australian sites like Mulgarrie, potentially shortening the optimisation cycle for mixed‑fleet autonomy in hard‑rock gold operations.
With gold flagged repeatedly in our recent coverage, including record 2025 prices, successful autonomy milestones at an Australian gold mine such as Mulgarrie are likely to be watched by other cost‑sensitive gold operators looking to lock in margins rather than expand greenfield capacity.
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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