Posted on March 26, 2025
Dredge Robotics is rapidly expanding its profile at home and overseas as mining companies recognise the value in its unique solution.
When Dredge Robotics attended MINExpo in Las Vegas last year, the company made a somewhat unlikely discovery.
“We were expecting we might find other players emerging into our market or having a crack at it, but we really couldn’t identify anyone else that was even remotely in our realm,” Dredge chief executive officer Antony Old told Australian Mining.
Dredge Robotics is generating significant interest in its novel dredging technology, which can safely clean lined ponds containing contaminants at both ends of the pH spectrum.
The company used its international trip not only as an opportunity to attend MINExpo and engage with new clients at the event but also to visit nearby mining operations and gauge the appetite for its solution.
During his time in the US, Old pondered what could be perceived as a ‘good problem to have’, something that validates the unbridled growth potential of Dredge’s technology.
“We’re certainly more broadly capable than we were seven years ago (when Dredge Robotics was founded),” he said. “But I did envisage back then that if we did get to this point, we would be largely close to completing our development.
“But what we keep finding is that clients, and potential clients, are approaching us with new niche applications that are ideal for our tech but require some tweaking or some modifications to the system or the way the robot behaves.
Dredge’s robots are built by robotics, electrical and software engineers, as well as a fitting and fabrication team.
“We keep expanding into that rather than contracting, so I’m really impressed at what the development team has done in the last seven years, and we have an incredibly broad range of things that we can do and execute with our fleet.”
It is this sentiment that demonstrates Dredge’s upside.
Through its engagement with local and international industries, Dredge is coming to terms with the potential scale of its dredging technology while also recognising its standing as a significant disrupter in the sector.
So what does a Dredge project look like in practice?
“Projects range from being completely rinse-and-repeat, where an existing system has all the attributes to carry out a new project, to uncharted territory where we have to design or redesign a system from scratch,” Old said.
“We tend to find ourselves less and less in the latter category now, because we’ve done so much work across so many different projects and applications for different industries.
“We’ve covered enough ground now that we’ve navigated very low pH, very high pH, all sorts of different liquors and liner-safe designs, and produced all sorts of tooling that the robots can carry.”
Dredge has also developed a unified software platform across its fleet.
“We run a unified platform for control, management and integration,” Old said. “Irrespective of which robot model we’re operating, whether it’s a small robot you could pick up yourself or a large robot that weighs close to a tonne, they all run the same software platforms and they run the same computational architecture.
Dredge Robotics is constantly evolving its technology as new use cases come in.
“Everything is consistent and repeatable, so if you’re going to create a relatively bespoke solution you’re not starting from zero. A lot of the AI architecture and electrical and programming software is all embedded and very versatile.”
Old said Dredge is increasingly getting to a point where it’s developing bespoke tooling to accompany an established dredging platform.
“Where we have clients with a particular type of sediment or a particular challenge they want to execute with our robot, we design and build a customised tooling head for the most appropriate robot model for the purpose,” he said.
“We might develop a solution for client A, and then client B comes along six months later and says, we’ve got exactly the same problem, which is relatively fortuitous for them because little-to-no development is required from our end, making it quicker and more affordable to deploy that system the second time around.”
Dredge has progressively grown its technology as it’s engaged new clients and new use cases.
Old explained how developing an acid dredging solution created a ripple effect of interest.
“We were originally approached by one of our major clients five years ago about whether we could remove the human element from dredging a pond that had a very low pH with sulfuric acid in it,” Old said.
“At the time, this was a perplexing challenge that required a lot of day-one thinking. But as soon as we started engaging with the client, and the market became marginally aware of what we were doing, we started to find use cases everywhere.
“When you look around in mining and manufacturing, it’s amazing how many facilities are required to use low pH environments as part of their processing, which means it’s a very common problem. And to date, outside of what we’ve done, there’s not really an elegant solution to any of that.
“So the value proposition is typically very high, and we’re now finding out the market for it is relatively large as well.”
Dredge’s evolving acid dredging capabilities are representative of the company’s growth journey in recent years, whereby the use cases continue to balloon depending on the pH and liquor being dredged.
In these situations, it could be said that Dredge, which needs to quickly adapt, is only as good as its research and development (R&D) team.
Luckily for the company, it has one of the best R&D teams in the business, boasting robotics engineers who conduct physical rendering of robot designs and stress testing, as well as an electrical team to take care of the software design and hardware configuration.
This is complemented by a few specialist engineers and a fitting and fabrication team that assembles the robots for site.
Dredge Robotics recently surpassed 100 employees and continues to expand.
While there are sub-divisions within the company, Dredge employees work together to ensure the best system and solution is delivered to the client.
“We have an incredibly capable and multi-skilled team,” Old said. “Many of our employees have multiple disciplines they operate in, which makes the team really versatile and able to platform things really quickly with a high success rate.”
It’s the close-knit nature of Dredge that ensures solutions are delivered quickly and effectively, without clients needing to navigate excessive red tape.
Founded with four workers in 2018, Dredge Robotics recently surpassed 100 employees and continues to expand.
When asked about Dredge’s objectives for 2025, Old said the company would remain focused on maintaining its identity and integrity amid rapid growth.
“We’re starting to scale to the point where you have to give very deliberate thought into how you scale and where you scale,” Old said.
“There’s plenty of demand there and we need to ensure that we’re executing projects with the right clients who share our values and share our safety orientation. Then we just want to get onto organically growing a company which is becoming a burgeoning international success story.”
