Hot, dirty and cashed up have become synonymous with the fly in, fly out miner in Western Australia.

But that image is slowly being bulldozed by technology, with driverless trucks, trains and drills replacing manual and often dangerous mining jobs.

"It's a shifting and upgrading of skills; we're moving from primitive work to advanced work," said Philip Kirchlechner, who has spent years working in the iron ore game, his job being to marry Australian miners with Chinese steel mills.

"By eliminating those mundane, often dangerous jobs, you create safer and more sophisticated jobs."

Mr Kirchlechner said the move to automation was the only way for Australian miners to remain competitive in the world market.

"We have to do things smarter, we have to use technology to raise productivity, and that's going to touch on a whole spectrum of mining," he said.

"All the way from finding the new mines, processing better, mining more efficiently."

Technology revolution sweeping the Pilbara

The three iron ore heavyweights in the Pilbara have launched into the new world of automated mining, where the people are leaving the dirty work to the mechanical monsters in the pit.

With the decade-long mining boom pushing up wages and costs to unrealistic heights and ongoing scrutiny of safety in the mines, it is not hard to see why.

Tim Day has been in charge of rolling out BHP's automation program at its brand new Jimblebar mine in the Pilbara.

An ore processing plant at the Jimblebar iron ore mine, east of Newman in WA's Pilbara.

He says there are several drivers for the change.

"The single biggest reason is safety," Mr Day said.

"On a mine site, one of the issues we have is that we expose operators to machinery for long periods of time. We have fatigue issues, so it takes our people away from the front line."

The dangers of mining are all too real.

A recent Department of Mines study analysed the deaths of 52 miners over the past 12 years, finding worker fatigue and inexperience with mining risks to be the biggest cause of accidents.

However, while miners are keen to sell the technology as a ticket to safer mine sites, it is also a ticket to cutting costs.

"It should also actually introduce a lot more hours onto the machines, so you can actually use the machinery more because you don't need lunch breaks, you don't need crib times or shift changes," Mr Day said.

And what productivity and efficiency gains essentially boils down to is lower costs for producers and greater returns for investors.

With reduced costs on accommodation, flights and site penalties, some estimate each autonomous truck saves a million dollars per year.

The saving, Mr Kirchlechner says, is essential to remaining cost competitive on the world stage.

"As the world is becoming more global, capital is mobile, so we are always competing for capital," he said.

"And because the industry is becoming so capital intensive, and because capital costs have risen so quickly, it's really putting pressure on companies to become more productive."

Automation technology years in the making

BHP was not the first big miner to make the shift.

Multinational Rio Tinto pre-empted the move, teaming up with Japanese giant Komatsu to start trialling driverless trucks on its Pilbara mine sites in 2008.

It now has 30 autonomous trucks across two of its Pilbara mine sites, with ambitious plans to roll out 150.

Fortescue Metals Group was the next cab off the rank, signing up with Caterpillar in 2011. It now has a fleet of 12 trucks on its Solomon Mine sites.

BHP was the last to begin major automation, but it does not believe that puts it behind the eight ball. Rather, the company says, the delay gave the technology time to improve.

"I think BHP was probably looking at automation four to five years ago, but it has really only just come to the forefront, as the technology is getting better," Mr Day said.

While BHP might only have a small fleet of six trucks at the moment, that is just the beginning of a bigger technology revolution.

Just this week, the company announced plans to expand its truck trial.

"As we prove it up and get far more mature in what we do, we will very much head towards introducing more circuits," Mr Day said.

"In fact, we're heading towards a second circuit middle of this year, so we will add another six trucks."

Robotic, not remote controlled

The new-generation trucks are not remote controlled, they are truly autonomous.

They have seven in-built safety features which prevent them from colliding with other trucks, allowing them to operate alongside manned vehicles.

"It has a GPS and a number of scanners on the front of the machine, and a number of sensors on the machine itself," Mr Day said.

"In between all of those, it can sense where it's going around site. To tell it where to go, we have a map of the mine site, which in effect can tell the machine which lanes it can physically go on-site."

While the trucks do all the heavy lifting, the brains behind the activity sit inside a control room on-site at the mine.

The control room workers are the eyes and ears of the trucks, and it is their job to create a virtual map of the mine and make sure the vehicles stay on course.

Fears remotely controlled mines could send jobs offshore

Doing things smarter demands somewhat different skills.

BHP's Tony Ottaviano says that is not a bad thing.

"There will be a higher level of requirement to understand the technology, but that's a good thing because we can up-skill the existing workforce through training," he said.

It is this transformation that has unions worried.

They embrace the obvious safety benefits but fear that the ability to remotely control mine operations could eventually be shifted offshore.

While operations are currently on-site, the technology could, in theory, allow operators to control the mine from anywhere in the world.

"At the moment, we see no plans of off-shoring anything to do with the IROC (Integrated Remote Operations Centre)," Mr Ottaviano said.

"In fact, it doesn't make sense, so we see it very much as a West Australian-led initiative."

While BHP's newly opened remote operations centre in Perth does not currently have any control over its driverless truck fleet, that is the future vision.

"It will be the natural platform for us to roll out autonomy across our operations and into the future," Mr Ottaviano said.

What's in it for WA?

It is clear the Pilbara has become the world's testing ground for autonomous technology, but what are the long-term benefits for WA?

Caterpiller's Dale Blyth says that despite being headquartered in the United States, the company trains its Pilbara workers in Perth.

"We rely heavily on our dealer (WesTrac) for the training side of this operation," he said.

"We've done development work here in Western Australia. We wanted to seek out one of the harshest environments on earth and I think we've found that."

Western Australia is already a hub for mining software, with 60 per cent of the world's product being designed and manufactured here.

Like Philip Kirchlechner, many in the game see automation as key to growing that market.

"It's sparking more industries, it's sparking more new companies in mining-related technologies," he said.

"Which if one day resources are mined out, we will still be able to export technology, software, all the mining-related high level skills we've developed in the meantime."