Hitachi Construction Machinery and Australian autonomy specialist Pronto have signed a global memorandum of understanding to develop open-architecture mine automation for haul trucks and other mobile equipment. The partnership targets interoperable fleet control, collision avoidance and autonomous haulage that can integrate with mixed OEM fleets rather than locking sites into proprietary ecosystems. For mine operators, this signals more flexible retrofit options for existing Hitachi and non-Hitachi fleets, with potential to phase in autonomy on brownfield haul roads and benches without full system replacement.

Liebherr is deploying application engineers such as Michael Anthony to mine sites to analyse real operating conditions, combining machine data logging, digital simulations and on-board monitoring to close performance gaps in ultra-class haul trucks and excavators. Teams are benchmarking duty cycles, payload distributions and fuel burn against OEM envelopes, then adjusting parameters like digging geometry, bucket sizing and truck–shovel match to lift effective utilisation without hardware changes. For engineers, the message is to treat OEM support as a data-driven optimisation service, not just maintenance, with gains coming from cycle-time diagnostics rather than new fleet purchases.

Red Hill Minerals has started a 1200m, two-hole diamond drilling programme to test a strong off-hole EM conductor at its expanded Anabama copper–gold project in South Australia. The drilling targets potential extensions of copper–gold–silver mineralisation previously intersected at Anabama, which sits within the Curnamona earn-in joint venture with Spectre Metals. Results will clarify the scale and geometry of the conductor, guiding follow-up drilling, resource definition and any deeper geophysical work across the Curnamona tenement package.