dSPACE NEWS CUSTOMERS The World ´s Largest Industrial Robot Draglines costing up to $100 million each are used in Australian open cut coal mines. A dragline is like a huge crane which is used to clear and shift overburden, i.e., soil and rocks, with an excavation bucket suspended from its 100-meter boom. The bucket weighs 40 tons when empty and can reach 120 tons when fully loaded. Increasing the productivity of these machines by just a few percent could boost Australia’s annual coal mining revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars. Current research by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) uses dSPACE Prototyper to automate the machine’s digging cycle. The Digging Cycle A typical dragline bucket scoops up about 100 tons of fragmented overburden in one go, swings it 9

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