The setting
's lets heavy mining trucks and equipment operate on their own at customer mine sites. It combines vehicle controls, sensors, computers and fleet software.
A reusable retrofit module must fit varied haul trucks without becoming impossible to service.
Faster installation protects fleet availability, while rugged packaging protects the autonomy hardware through mine conditions.
Who you’d be doing this for
“I’ve got trucks sitting in the workshop while the pit keeps asking for more tonnes.”
Oscar Castillo · Mine Operations Manager · a character in this brief
Accountable for haul-truck availability and production while older vehicles wait for autonomy retrofit.
What is at stake
Older haul trucks wait in the workshop for custom autonomy installations. You must decide what belongs in a common module and what remains truck-specific.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- common packaging vs vehicle-specific interfaces
- faster installation vs environmental survivability
- field service access vs protected enclosure design
- pilot yield vs low-volume flexibility
Why Applied Intuition
Drive-by-wire and sensor integration on mixed OEM heavy equipment determines how quickly autonomous hauling can expand beyond a single truck configuration.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 93 more at Applied Intuition, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Applied Intuition. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Engineering Technician (opens in a new tab)
- Support the build, installation, integration, commissioning, and maintenance of autonomous vehicle hardware and supporting systems.
- Practical experience working in a workshop, field, lab, or assembly environment and a commitment to high-quality workmanship.
- Hardware Systems Lead, Industrials (opens in a new tab)
- Define and drive survivability: determine how sensors, compute, harnesses, connectors, and enclosures will hold up to vibration, shock, dust, water ingress, thermal extremes, EMI, and years of heavy use
- Lead integration of sensors (lidar, radar, cameras, GNSS/IMU), compute, power, networking, and actuation onto OEM heavy equipment
- Hardware Integration Engineer (Mining) (opens in a new tab)
- Provide vehicle integration support across the organization by designing, prototyping, and installing proof-of-concept systems and sensors under evaluation.
- You will work directly with our hardware engineers, engineering technicians, operators and safety drivers.
- Robotics Integration Engineer (TL) · no longer posted
- Own the vehicle platform end-to-end: networking, time synchronization, sensor selection and drivers, middleware integration, embedded software, drive-by-wire, and low-level controls actuation
- As a Senior Robotics & Integration Engineer, you will own the software and hardware platform that our intelligent autonomy stack runs on — everything from networking, time synchronization, sensors and drivers, and middleware, down to embedded systems, drive-by-wire, and low-level controls actuation.
Reporting read before this brief was written
The pieces closest to the situation in this brief.
In August 2026, SMM said falling prices of cross-brand autonomous kits are accelerating adoption while retrofitting older, mixed-brand fleets remains a drag, and that Vale's Salobo copper mine brought 19 autonomous trucks online with a plan to reach 150 within two years.
[SMM Analysis] Why are major miners investing heavily in autonomous and electrified copper mines? - Shanghai Metals Market (SMM) (opens in a new tab) · news.metal.com · Aug 28, 2026
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Applied Intuition’s Mining Autonomy and Drive-by-Wire System, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Mine operations managers are waiting on fixes while reviews reopen for missing vehicle evidence.
You must decide whether AI marks uncertain evidence or holds the change for an engineer to investigate.
Mine managers cannot compare autonomous shifts without rebuilding truck data by hand.
You must decide which fleet measures belong in one view without hiding meaningful vehicle differences.
Autonomous haul trucks are stopping after brake commands should have expired.
You must choose a control-interface release that restores availability without accepting unverified braking behavior.