Charlie King, CEO of Tribe Technology, talks to Proactive about the milestone event of shipping its first autonomous RC drill rig.
Charlie King: It’s the culmination of five years of work, over 200,000 development hours.
A huge amount of innovation, hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and a few grey hairs from the team.
But, it’s amazing seeing it rolling out of the factory ready to get out to Australia and start doing some work and making money for its purchaser, major drilling subsidiary, Mackay Drilling.
Proactive: Take us through this autonomous drill rig and what sets it apart. How's it going to disrupt the drilling industry?
Charlie King: Drilling is really the last bastion of heavy manual labour within the mining industry.
And there are some fantastic companies like Anglo American, which's also a client of ours, with fully autonomous mines.
But the last thing that they've got people working on doing very dangerous work is on exploration and resource definition drill rigs.
We’re the first company to produce a drill that can drill with nobody on the drilling pad while it's operating.
So that's a complete step change. And that opens up productivity improvement as well as massive safety benefits because suddenly we're still having far too many fatalities on drill rigs.
Proactive: This is your proprietary technology. It’s due to arrive in Australia at the end of September, and there you'll be testing results in the field. Is that right?
Charlie King: The rig title of goods transfers to Mackay Drilling when it arrives in Australia. We will support them through the process of getting the rig ready to be shipped off to Fortescue Metals Group (FMG), where they've got a large contract by specifying our technology.
So very, very exciting for them, very exciting for us and very exciting for the industry in general.
Proactive: You mentioned Anglo American and you recently sent a sample system to Master Drilling, a contractor for Anglo American. Explain what the sample system is.
Charlie King: The whole reason these machines exist is to take a sample to get an accurate representation of the metre you're drilling, which the miners or exploration companies then assay.
And that forms the basis of the resource modelling to a JORC 2012 standard.
If you're a mining investor, you will be very familiar with that term.
But the way we're currently sampling is very manual, very dangerous, and it has a lot of contamination.
To make the process automated, we believe, from what we're seeing on site, we’ve actually managed to dramatically increase sample quality as well, which is obviously very, very exciting.
And there's a very large addressable market. There are about 1400 drill rigs in the world.
We can make these faster, turn them around quicker than we can do for our core product line.
So this is a good example of IP we've developed for our drill system, being able to spin it out.
You've seen other examples of that with joint development agreements with Veracio as well as Index, huge players within the mining technology space.
Proactive: With that first drill rig en route to Australia, what's your pipeline looking like?
Charlie King: Very healthy and building. I don't want to give forward projections in the market, but we have contracts in place for five of our drills.
So, we have a very substantial and growing pipeline of interest, mainly from the tier-one miners and tier-one contractors. We've got a very robust sales pipeline.