Voice Dispatcher for an Open-Pit Mine: How to Collect Equipment Data by Radio

 A contractor's haul truck returns from another trip, but the customer's dispatch system shows no record of it. Another truck's sensor has failed. The equipment keeps working, but the dispatcher has to find out over the radio how much got done and whether there were any delays.

Asking a driver or operator once is easy enough. But when you need that information regularly, from many crews, the conversations start eating up more and more time. While the dispatcher is collecting answers, word of a stoppage or a shortfall can arrive too late to do anything about it during that same shift.

How a voice dispatcher could help here

Log Sheet already has a voice robot: it calls employees on a schedule, asks questions, and saves the answers to a digital journal. At a pit, the robot could poll equipment crews over the radio — digital or analog. A call to a mobile phone is another option.

Here's roughly how it might work. At the set time, the robot reaches the haul truck driver and asks how many trips they've made. Then it reaches the excavator operator: how many trucks they've loaded, whether there were any delays. Both answers are saved to the journal, tagged to the equipment and the shift.

This isn't about constantly monitoring the airwaves — it's short, targeted polls of specific crews. If a crew doesn't answer, the robot can retry the call and then flag it to the dispatcher. The dispatcher also gets handed anything that actually needs a human — a report of downtime, for instance.

How information from a crew reaches the journal and the dispatcher. Diagram of the proposed scenario.

When this would come in handy

To get data during the shift, not just after it. When trips and loads are tracked from crew reports, the dispatcher ends up asking drivers and operators the same questions over and over. A voice robot could do this on a schedule — asking, say, how many trips have been completed since the last check-in and whether there's been any downtime. Answers would land in the journal as the shift goes on. If output drops, that's something you could catch and look into before the shift ends, rather than after.

 The "Haul Trip Tally" demo journal: records, data source, and a snippet of a voice robot conversation.

When automated tracking doesn't cover the whole pit. One area feeds data straight from the equipment; on another, the dispatcher still learns how things went from radio conversations. Polling the crews would help collect that second area's data the same way. Then, reviewing a shift, the dispatcher wouldn't have to hold two different pictures in their head — what the system shows and what they were told.

At shift close-out. The driver reports the actual number of completed trips — the trip tally. The excavator operator confirms how many trucks they loaded. Save those answers to the journal and you can cross-check them against the other records. If the numbers don't match, the dispatcher sees exactly what to verify before closing out the report. That reconciliation matters most where confirmed output ties directly to pay.

When a sensor goes down. The haul truck keeps working, but automatic trip data stops coming in for a while. During that stretch, the driver could report completed work over the radio instead. Those reports would land in the journal, and reviewing the shift, it would be clear which data came from the equipment and which came from the crew.

For working with contractors. Contractor trucks might haul alongside the rest of the fleet without being connected to the customer's system at all. Regular reports from their drivers would give the customer their own independent record of completed trips — something to compare later against the volumes the contractor claims when billing for the work.

What changes for the dispatcher

Before a shift, you can set the list of crews, the questions, and the polling times. If a driver reports downtime or low output, you can ask them for the reason right away. And if nobody answers a call, the dispatcher knows exactly who to reach out to personally.

The dispatcher still has to sort out missed answers and disputed numbers — a voice robot doesn't take that away. But by the time it comes to sorting things out, the regular reports are already sitting in the journal, and there's no need to start by polling every crew just to find out where the problem is.

When a sensor goes quiet or a machine isn't hooked into the system, a person — the driver or the operator — can still say what happened. That's the idea behind Log Sheet's voice dispatcher: ask the right question over the radio or a mobile call at the right time, and save the answer. Trip and downtime data then reaches the system while the shift is still running, when you can actually act on it — and stays on hand when it's time to close things out.