Robotic Mining

[Anarchist Patriot]

From “Armchair Mining”, Midwest Society of Engineers, Sept. October 2003 Issue.

By John DeGaspari

http://www.wsechicago.org/midwest_engineer.asp

Underground mining is dusty, noisy, and dangerous work for those who run the big drills and haulers in the tunnels, and it is costly for the companies that operate the mines. Each day, miners descend thousands of feet into the dark bowels of the earth to operate huge rigs that drill, blast and haul rock that contains ore.

Over the last several years, however, a few companies have begun working with remotely cooperated machinery. These are the first steps in moving the most vulnerable link – the human operators – out of harm’s way, while at the same time increasing the mine’s competitiveness.

Overall, the mining industry does not have the highest injury and illness rate among industries – at least not in the United States as of April this year, according to the US Department of Labor. In 2001, the rate of fatalities in underground mines in this country was less than one per 100 workers. In terms of raw numbers, mining has shown an over all decrease over the past decade, with 181 fatalities in 1992 and 156 in 1999. That is much lower than agriculture, forestry and fishing, which had 816 fatalities combined. Even retailing had a higher number of job-related deaths – 515.

Remote-controlled mining, known as teleportation, could help drive down injury further by removing miners from hazardous areas and, at the same time, could significantly increase productivity, according to some experts. While teleoperations is not yet widespread, it has been implemented by a handful of companies. They often view it as part of a larger strategy to automate their operations.

As companies and automation experts bring teleoperated machinery into working mines, they are facing questions of how this evolution will effect day to day operations, worker responsibilities, and mine designs. Figuring out the best way to handle those issues could help pave the way for wider implementations

Why it matters.

John Steele, an assistant professor of engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, views teleoperation as the first step to wider automation in mines. He believes that the lives of one or two miners could be saved a year simply by moving them out of harm’s way. It would reduce contact with other health hazards as well.

Overall mining automation could result in significant cost savings, Steele said. Travel time to and from the surface can take hours, reducing productive work by as much as 50 percent in a typical eight, or 12-hour shift. “You could immediately double productivity by automating these machines,” he said.

And there are other benefits as well, For example, large, power-hungry fans that control the flow of air through the mines could be eliminated if miners were no longer underground, and so an expense can be eliminated.

Greg Baiden, a professor of engineering with a chair in robotics and mine automation at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario believes that mining automation requires fewer human and capital resources to do the same amount of work. Fewer supplies are required because the mine operates more efficiently. And because it takes less work to get the job done, the mine operates faster. Those factors could also result in improvement in quality.

Luc St. Arnaud is the general manager of SIAMtec, a Saint-Laurent, Quebec, mining automation supplier partly owned by Noranda, Inc., a Canadian mining and metals company. He believes that teleoperation provides more flexibility in getting the ore from the mine. It allows access to areas that would be off limits to manned vehicles. “It is adapting the mine design so that you could relax your safety criteria to standards that are okay for a vehicle, but not ok for a vehicle with an operator on it,” he said.

Staying in touch

Two developments in recent years have dovetailed to make teleoperations in mines possible. One is a robot communication backbone in the mine, capable of handling data, voice, and radio signals. The other is smart mining equipment, outfitted with on-board computers and a host of sensors.

Having better communications networks, comprising cable and wireless, is the key development that opened the door to teleoperated mining, according to Baiden. In 2001 he started a mining automation company, ASI, in Sudbury7. Prior to that, he headed the mining automation program at Inco Ltd. Of Toronto, when the company developed a high-bandwidth telecommunications system that would work in rock tunnels. While bandwidth is a limited commodity on the surface, the full radio frequency spectrum is available underground where it is essentially self contained for use in the mind. In his view, this is one reason that teleoperations may be more feasible for underground mining than for open pit mining.

[Pooeypants]

And if we use this technically on the moon, we'd get a moon base build in no time...:)

[Samildanach]

Yes instead of those crappy little satellites they use now but we still need to cojncentrate on on the space elevator.