Tata Steel signs MoU with drone start-up AUS

The primary goal of this collaboration is to jointly develop and offer sustainable & end-to-end integrated solutions that will focus on the efficiency, safety, and productivity of open cast mining operations. Tata Steel will also work jointly with AUS to provide exclusive drone-based solutions including mine analytics and geo-technical mapping, to Tata Steel group companies across various stocks and mining locations in India.

On the partnership, D. B. Sundara Ramam, Vice President, Raw Materials, Tata Steel, said: “We are excited to work with AUS again, this time for a longer duration and with a broader vision of sustainable development. Drone survey enabled digitalisation and other technology will assist in gathering impactful and actionable insights. We see enormous potential in redefining core mining processes such as exploration and mine planning using drone data and adequate analytics. These end-to-end mining solutions are economical, demand fewer on-foot exploration requirements, and improve production, efficiency, and site safety. We also intend to offer our learnings to the rest of the world's mining companies as a professional solution from our fully owned unit, Tata Steel Industrial Consultancy Limited.”

Tata Steel, as a global and diverse mining company, is committed to ensuring sustainable mining across all its global operations.

All its key mining sites are certified under EMS ISO 14001, the international environmental management standard.

Tata Steel has also adopted a holistic business model that looks at the entire value chain comprising Steel Value chain: from captive mining to downstream steel businesses, Raw Materials Value Chain: the mining of chrome and manganese ore to production and sale of ferro-alloys & minerals and Other Businesses: Such as equipment manufacturing, bearings, and agricultural equipment manufacturing.

The Company also aspires to leverage the opportunities arising from the Government’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” Programme and regulatory changes to meet captive raw material requirements beyond 2030 by creating a sustainable mining business.

The Noamundi Iron Mine of Tata Steel has also recently been accorded 5-Star rating for sustainable development for the year 2020-21. This is for the sixth time in a row that Noamundi Mine has received this honour. The mine was accorded 5-Star rating in 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 as well.

Tata Steel, a mining major, had charted out its vision a couple of years ago to become a leading player in digitalising its mining operations across the value chain. Digitalisation enables the development of targeted strategies using real-time data and data analytics, provides visualisation and decision matrix tools to predict failure, helps in optimisation of scheduling and material flow, and improves the capability of beneficiation plants through online monitoring of quality data. It also helps in improving productivity through real time monitoring of equipment, plant and operator performance and sweating of capital-intensive mining equipment.

AUS has been working closely with the steel sector behemoth to provide state-of-the-art drone technology to modernise its mining operations. The latest contract will focus on using remote mine monitoring to improve efficiency, safety, and productivity of the mines.

Commenting on the partnership, Vipul Singh, Founder and CEO, Aarav Unmanned Systems, said: “Tata Steel is one of the world’s leading steel companies and it has been an honour to provide our sustainable and integrated mining solutions for their operations. The accuracy, reliability and consistency of data is critical in the mining sector, and our solutions will be able to improve Tata Steel’s productivity & efficiency and contribute to modernize their mining operations. Tata Steel’s trust in us to create end-to-end solutions jointly with them, for the domestic and global mining industry, directly reflects on the vision we share and openness of a behemoth like Tata Steel to partner with a startup to derive the most effective solution.”