Recently, the China Machinery Industry Federation and the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society jointly announced the winners of the 2025 "Machinery Industry Science and Technology Award." The project "Key Technologies and Applications of Multi-Equipment Collaborative Operation and Efficient Management and Control Platform for Smart Mines," jointly completed by North Industries Group Corporation Limited (North Co.) together with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and several other institutions, won the first prize of the Machinery Industry Science and Technology Award (Technology Invention Award). This honor is not only authoritative recognition of the project's technical level, but also full affirmation of North Co.'s commitment to independent innovation and its leading role in the industrial chain in the field of smart mines.

Smart mining is an important development direction for China to achieve "safety through unmanned operations and safety through fewer personnel" in mining areas, and has become a technological high ground on which mining and industrial enterprises worldwide are focusing their efforts. Although intelligent mining equipment represented by unmanned mining trucks has gradually been put into application in recent years, three major technical challenges—poor reliability of drive-by-wire chassis, poor coordination of operational collaboration, and poor agility of mine management and control—have led to high failure rates and low work efficiency of mining operation equipment, restricting the promotion and application of smart mining systems.

In response to these industry pain points, North Co. and Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions formed a joint team that, through years of collaborative "industry-academia-research-application" efforts, conducted in-depth research across multiple levels—from component hardware to drive-by-wire architecture, from planning strategies to collaboration methods, and from ore blending optimization to management and control platforms—ultimately achieving breakthroughs in three major technical bottlenecks: the reliability of the chassis drive-by-wire system, the coordination of transportation operation planning, and the agility of unmanned mine management and control. This resulted in a complete smart mining solution and its large-scale application, providing strong technical and product support for "true unmanned operation" and "high efficiency" in China's mines.

As the main completing unit of the project, North Co. has made major innovations in drive-by-wire chassis architecture design and drive-by-wire actuation control technology. In the future, North Co. will continue to strengthen independent innovation and, with a more open approach to cooperation, more advanced technical products, and a more complete global service system, help mines transform toward intelligence and green development, contributing North Co.'s wisdom and strength to the high-quality development of the global mining industry.