GoKawiilThere is a lot of attention on domestic manufacturing in the United States these days. But for Turner Caldwell, who spent nearly a decade at Tesla, there’s not enough attention on the minerals and metals that sit at the very bottom of the supply chain.
It’s why he left Tesla and started Mariana Minerals in 2024. The purpose of his startup is to become a modern mining (and refining) operation that is set up for growth, because Caldwell has essentially one goal: bring more refined metal into the ecosystem. To do that, his company is trying to automate almost every aspect of a mining operation imaginable.
The latest piece is vehicles. On Thursday, Mariana Minerals announced a partnership with Pronto, a startup that’s developed self-driving systems for haulage trucks and other off-road vehicles used at construction and mining sites.
It’s the first deal that Pronto has struck since being acquired by Atoms, the new robotics venture run by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick. The acquisition reunites Kalanick with Pronto founder Anthony Levandowski, the former star Google self-driving project engineer and controversial entrepreneur behind Otto, which Uber acquired in 2016.
The partnership with Pronto will see autonomous haulage trucks begin operating next week at Copper One, a formerly idled copper mine in Utah that Mariana purchased last year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
But the partnership is about more than just having autonomous trucks operating onsite, Caldwell told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Pronto’s autonomy system will be directly integrated into the software Mariana has developed to run operations at the mine, which it calls “MineOS.” That will make it possible to autonomously dispatch the trucks and coordinate their routes without a human in the loop, he said.
This is part of Caldwell’s broader vision for how a mine should be run going forward. It involves multiple operating systems that use reinforcement learning to automate and, eventually, coordinate operations across the entire mine.
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