Interview by Global Business Reports
Michael Gribbons: President, CEO and Co-founder of Maestro Digital Mine.
Can you outline the importance of your partnerships with Exyn Technologies and Boston Dynamics?
Maestro has two key ecosystem partnerships, and both are with autonomous devices. One is with Exyn on their autonomous drones that can find their way around a mine. The other one is Boston Dynamics' Spot, the robotic autonomous dog. We are lucky to have been identified by both companies as being the ideal partner for technology and gas monitoring. The whole application is about getting data back to the face, and both Exyn and Boston Dynamics enable technology to go into places where there is no network. I see this foremost as a worker safety apparatus. If you have an explosion in a mine and the network is down, you can send in either Spot with a big payload or you can send in an Exyn drone to get the job done quicker.
What are the keys to Maestro’s success in consistently introducing new technology into mines?
Product development is about predicting what the next phase of evolution is going to be. In that respect, you must understand the mining industry, and the new technologies that are available. You must then tailor those technologies for the industry. Maestro is not interested in incremental improvement. We are looking at step change, and we typically do that by disruption. The type of disruption we pursue is about simplifying our products. For example, we try to avoid adding a PLC, panel or any other associated pieces of software, or engineering services.
Read the full interview in the Global Business Reports website here.