Small but Mighty: How a Sensor the Size of a Shoebox Is Rewriting Mining’s Most Overlooked Asset

Stand next to a 400-tonne haul truck, and the scale of the thing does something to your sense of proportion. It’s fifteen metres of steel, four-metre tyres, a machine built to move mountains one bucket at a time. Now find the sensor mounted on it. You’ll need to look for it. It’s small enough to miss.

That mismatch, a machine you can barely see changing the economics of a machine you can’t ignore, is the whole story of what Decoda has spent the last few years building.

Where the Idea Actually Came From

It didn’t start as a haul road company. Decoda began life reviewing mine site data, helping operations squeeze more performance out of what they already had. One thing kept coming up that nobody had a clean answer for: haulage fleets were losing tyres faster than they should, and nobody could point to exactly why.

The obvious place to look was the truck itself. That’s where the instinct led first, and it was wrong, or at least incomplete. The truck wasn’t the variable. The road underneath it was. Every pothole, every stretch of loose rock, every rut that had been there long enough to become “just how that section drives” was quietly eating tyres, fuel and time, and almost nobody was measuring it the way they measured anything else that cost that much money.

It’s a view Decoda has built its entire premise around: the haul road is the most undervalued asset on a mine site. Not because anyone thinks it’s unimportant. Because for decades there was no practical way to see it clearly enough to manage it like one.

Image Courtesy of Decoda

Treating the Ground Like an Asset, Not a Given

Most of what happens to a haul road happens invisibly, in the sense that it accumulates faster than anyone’s watching it. Traditional inspection means someone in a light vehicle making a judgment call, or a drone capturing a snapshot a couple of times a day. Neither approach sees the road the way a fully loaded haul truck experiences it, and that gap is where the damage lives.

It’s worth sitting with how strange that actually is. Mine sites will instrument a crusher, a conveyor, a pump station down to the smallest vibration, because those assets are visible, fixed, easy to point a sensor at. The haul road carries every single tonne the site produces, and for decades it’s had less real-time data attached to it than almost anything else on the property. Not because anyone decided it didn’t matter. Because nobody had built a practical way to watch a surface that stretches for kilometres and changes shift by shift.

Decoda’s answer was to stop trying to inspect the road from the outside and instead let the trucks measure it themselves. High-resolution LiDAR and cameras, mounted directly on the haulage fleet, turn every truck into a continuous survey instrument, scanning the surface it’s actually driving on, in real time, at a resolution no scheduled inspection could match.

The output isn’t a report someone has to interpret days later. It’s immediate. A hazard gets flagged the moment it appears, and the system can trigger a maintenance response before the next truck reaches the same stretch of road. The road stops being something a site reacts to after the fact and becomes something it actually manages, the same way it manages every other asset that costs real money when it fails.

What That Actually Looks Like in the Numbers

The shift from guesswork to measurement isn’t just conceptually tidier. It shows up in the results. Testing of the technology has recorded a 60 per cent reduction in tyre-rock impacts, alongside gains of up to 20 per cent in tyre life and 4 per cent in truck availability. On an asset class where a single ultra-class tyre can run into six figures and a degraded stretch of road can cost a site thousands of dollars an hour in lost production, those percentages compound fast across a fleet running continuously.

Safety sits underneath all of it. Tyre-handling work is among the most hazardous maintenance tasks on a mine site, and every rock impact avoided is one less unplanned tyre change a crew has to perform. The same sensing layer watches bund wall geometry at tip heads, catching the kind of non-compliance that leads to rollovers before a truck ever backs up to it. Fewer hazards on the road means fewer high-risk interventions off it.

The environmental line sits right next to the commercial one. A tyre that reaches closer to its full rated life instead of failing early is less rubber and steel destined for landfill, and a smoother, better-managed circuit means less fuel burned fighting rolling resistance. Fewer damaged tyres, fewer wasted litres, achieved through better data rather than heavier equipment.

Why This Matters More as Mining Automates

Here’s the part that turns this from a maintenance story into an infrastructure story. Autonomous haul trucks don’t have a human’s judgement about which bumps are worth ignoring. They’re programmed for caution, so a surface irregularity that a driver would barely register can bring an unmanned truck to a stop, and stopped trucks don’t move ore. Battery-electric haulage has its own version of the same problem: rolling resistance on a degraded surface drains range fast, quietly shortening how far a truck can run before it needs to recharge.

Neither of those futures works on a road nobody’s actually measuring. Spink has described it as needing a “beautiful” road underneath a zero-emission, autonomous fleet, and it’s not a throwaway line. The vehicles getting most of the attention in mining right now, the driverless trucks, the electric fleets, are all quietly dependent on a piece of infrastructure that’s historically had almost no data attached to it. Decoda’s technology is already running on autonomous haul trucks in Canada through its alliance with Kal Tire’s Mining Tire Group, and is now expanding into Latin America’s open-pit operations through a distribution partnership covering Chile and Brazil, putting that same layer of visibility in front of some of the most demanding sites in the world.

Small Enough to Miss, Built to Change the Maths

There’s something almost counterintuitive about the scale of this. The sensor doing all of this work is a fraction of the size of anything else on the truck. It doesn’t change how the vehicle drives, doesn’t slow anything down, doesn’t ask an operator to do anything differently. It just watches, continuously, and turns what used to be a guess into something a site can actually manage.

That’s arguably the more interesting engineering story than the technology itself: building something small enough to disappear onto a piece of thousand-tonne machinery, while the value it generates scales across an entire haul circuit, every shift, every truck, every load.

Mining has spent the last decade chasing bigger, more visible transformations: automation, electrification, digital twins of entire pits. Decoda’s argument is that some of the most consequential change in the industry is going to come from the smallest, least glamorous piece of the puzzle: the ground the fleet actually drives on, finally being watched the way everything else on site already is. That argument picked up outside recognition this month too, with Decoda named a 2026 Silver Stevie Technology Award winner for Transportation Technology Technical Innovation of the Year and dual Gold Stevies for Achievement in Technology Innovation of the Year and Company Of The Year in Metals & Mining in the 23rd Stevie International Business Awards®.

It’s easy to overlook, mostly because it sits underfoot instead of on a dashboard somewhere. But autonomous fleets, battery-electric haulage, the tighter margins that come with mines digging deeper for lower-grade ore, every bet the industry is making on the next decade runs directly over that same stretch of dirt. A road nobody’s watching doesn’t just slow trucks down. It quietly decides whether the rest of that strategy holds up at all.

George Spink is Executive General Manager of Decoda, a Brisbane-based mining technology company. He leads Decoda’s work turning the haul road from an overlooked cost centre into a continuously monitored, closed-loop asset for open-pit mines worldwide.

Website: https://decoda.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-spink-7761b05/

Image Courtesy of Dacoda