The Mobile Tunnel Miner, developed under the Rio Tinto Mine of the Future program, combines the flexibility of a roadheader with the robustness of a tunnel boring machine.

Using undercutting technology it can handle hard rock up to a maximum 300 megapascals.

It also can cut rectangular tunnels or horseshoe cross-sections up to six metres bore diameter, in addition to circular tunnels. This removes the need to backfill the lower section of the round cross section.

The machine can be moved forward with a walking mechanism and backwards with a crawler.

Aker Wirth engineers employed several swivel joints to get a 30m radius – which is small for a machine of this size and capacity.

It will be put to the test at Northparkes but Rio Tinto really has its eye on the technology for speeding up the development of deep copper deposits such as Oyu Tolgoi.

This article first appeared in ILN's sister publication MiningNews.net.