Autonomous heavy equipment
Autonomous machines that work alongside people.
mule.bot builds the layers above the machine: an open safety specification, the domain context a machine needs to work the way a competent crew does, the market measured from public registers, and the planning that keeps a fleet productive. The machine builder keeps the machine.
Why
Half the workforce retires within the decade.
More than half of the heavy-industry workforce retires within the decade. Fewer people will supervise more machines, and those machines will work near people.
Large-fleet autonomous haulage serves mines with fifty trucks or more, on a single vendor's closed system. Mid-tier sites cannot buy that. They are a countable set on the federal register, and no one is building for them.
What we build
Four layers above the machine.
MarketMetal Detector
Every mine, earthwork, landfill and cargo dock is on a federal register. We join the registers to public aerial imagery and count the machines working on each site.
Use casesIron Curriculum
What a competent crew does, in what order and under which rules, taken from the industry's own training material, codes of practice and standards, and cited so a specification can rely on it.
SafetyHitch
An open specification for autonomous machines working beside manned ones, written against ISO 17757 and MIT-licensed. Seven safety functions decide what the machine will and will not execute, and the specification runs as code.
PlanningBlock Model · Tactical Planner
Strategic, production and tactical planning that keeps a machine assigned, authorized and moving. The gain from autonomy is in hours recovered, not in cycle time.
Figures counted from our repositories between 23 August and 2 September 2026. Ask for any of them and we will show the source.
How we work
The builder keeps the machine.
A machine builder keeps control, perception, path planning and the retrofit kit, and takes the four layers above from us. The site and the builder both sign the safety case.
Services
- Product developmentBacklogs from real procedures. Requirements that carry their source.
- Safety validationThe hazard analysis, the safety case and the tests behind every safety function.
- Deployment planningSite readiness, specification, operating boundary, field testing, commissioning. Each stage ends with a signed gate.
Who we are
Twenty-five years in autonomous haulage.
On the vendor side and as the owner's independent reviewer. Architecture at Pronto.ai, SafeAI and Mobius/Epiroc. The mine owner's check on Caterpillar and Komatsu deployments. A doctorate in functional safety.
Partners