Technology & equipment
Drones are particularly useful for mapping stopes, which can be dangerous due to their risk of collapse.
“We had been developing autonomy for drones for a long time at CSIRO,” explains Hrabar, adding that preliminary work concentrated on adding sensors and computing power to drones to allow them to survey their environments without flying into obstacles. Work then progressed to develop the ability for the LIDAR sensor, to not only sense the environment but also to estimate how the drone was moving without using GPS – a capability Hrabar describes as extremely powerful. “We then started exploring different use cases and getting feedback from industry. It didn’t take long for miners to find out about what we were doing and said, ‘Hey, have you heard about a stope?’” A stope is created to access ore underground, with the excavation and extraction process often resulting in large unsupported spaces. However, stoping is a broad term and techniques vary depending on the ore, the type of mine and the country rock. Regardless, stopes can be dangerous places given their inherent risk of collapse, making them an ideal testing ground for this new generation of drones. The potential benefits of integrating LIDAR-equipped drones into a mine’s workflow are clear. “Mapping a stope with a drone takes only a few minutes, depending on the size,” says Hrabar. “With a typical stope, you could fly in, fly down, fly up and out again in five minutes or less.” That offers significant time advantages over traditional surveying techniques, such as the Cavity Monitoring System (CMS), which involves an operator manually manoeuvring a boom-based laser scanning head to peer into voids and cavities. “With a CMS-type boom, getting access to the area to scan is very difficult because it might be closed off with mesh or they might not have ventilation in that part of the mine,” says Hrabar, adding that ventilation
work is usually required to provide access. “You can do away with all those problems with the drone because you launch from a safe location and then fly around or over other obstacles that would get in the way of a CMS boom.” The primary benefit, therefore, is keeping people safe.
A secondary safety benefit is the new insights that can be derived. “You can have a better understanding of what the conditions are underground and see issues such as over breaks that can cause problems,” says Hrabar.
Introducing autonomy
The recent game changer for LIDAR drones and other robotic plant equipment has been improved levels of autonomy. Firstly, traditional line-of-sight control – based on humans on the joysticks watching the drone – has been augmented to ease the burden on pilots. “Hovermap forms a bubble around the drone to keep it safe and provide stability, even without GPS,” says Hrabar. “If you take your hands off the controls – even if you’re underground – it stays very stable. And that makes a huge difference because, without that, you have to have expert piloting skills – you’re adjusting your controls all the time so it can be very stressful.” This capability, which Hovermap had at launch, proved valuable underground in terms of flying line- of-sight in a safe, controlled and stress-free way, but the distance it could fly into a stope or down a drive was limited. To bridge that gap, Emesent extended its research to develop fully autonomous technology capable of flying drones well beyond an operator’s vision. For this beyond-line-of-sight capability, self-navigation is key.
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World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
Emesent
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