Automation & robotics Safe for work
As mines around the world implement autonomous systems into their operations, the importance of establishing controls to maintain the safety and security of personnel working alongside these systems is critical. Nicholas Kenny speaks with Chirag Sathe, a mining automation expert and co-author of the Global Mining Guidelines Group white paper “System Safety for Autonomous Mining”, on how mine operators can ensure mine safety while integrating this developing technology.
utomation in mining offers huge potential for the industry, and one of the biggest benefits it can provide is increasing on-site safety. Removing personnel from hazardous jobs or areas can reduce risk of injury, and automation, at its most basic level, literally removes the need for a direct human presence on these tasks. In the past decade, the mining industry has made considerable leaps forward in embracing this burgeoning technology, mostly focused around the mobile mining area – specifically, vehicles like haul trucks, water carts and light vehicles. Process plant automation, of course, has been carried out in the chemical process industry for the past 40–50 years, so the concept itself is far from new.
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The automation of haul trucks has been particularly successful and seen considerable investment as a result, due in part because it involves the most people in its operation. Each haul truck can operate on a 24-hour basis, requiring four or five drivers on rotating
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shifts. Long shifts can lead to driver tiredness and potentially cause accidents and injuries, which is part of why automating these vehicles was of such importance to the industry. At the same time, the operation of haul trucks contains comparably less variables than that of other vehicles or equipment in mining, such as diggers, dozers and excavators, which made the automation process easier to develop. While automated systems offer great benefits in improving on-site safety, questions arise over what challenges they can pose to safety at the same time. Even when certain vehicles and their processes are automated, that doesn’t mean that human workers are removed from the mine site entirely. Many jobs are unsuited to automation, or currently too complicated or expensive to automate. For the foreseeable future, then, any mine that implements automation will be doing so alongside human beings, and that can create its own challenges in terms of safety.
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
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