haul-road-inspection-with-automated-drones


There will come a time when the hauling process at open pit mines will look vastly different than it does today. Gone will be the onerous and choppy shovel-and-truck loading process. Gone may be the heavy trucks altogether, no longer snaking slowly along haul roads with their immense loads of overburden or ore, replaced by a system of pulleys and conveyor belts, perhaps, with heavily automated components optimizing the entire process.
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Those days are still a ways off, but automation and digital integration are already making significant inroads in the mining industry. Thanks to automated drones, haul roads are already starting to look different – with the inspection process automated and performed from the air, haul roads are looking safer and more efficient than ever.

The automated advantage

It isn’t any old industrial-grade drone that can truly impact and improve a mine’s operations, including haul road inspection. Where a standard industrial-grade drone requires a human pilot, negating cost savings, greatly increasing response times and subjecting data collection to the potential for human error, automated drones for mining take human pilots out of the equation and also automate maintenance, including battery swapping and payload and sensor changing to allow a single drone to complete a wide variety of missions.

An automated drone is one that can complete its entire operation with minimal or even no human intervention, and an automated drone is what will truly revolutionize haul road inspection.

Regular maintenance

As mine operators and engineers know, all haul roads really have in common with the average roads driven on by average drivers is that they are roads. The type of road damage that can be devastating to a mining operation often doesn’t come in the form of a pothole or washout or whatever else would signal something amiss with the average road. With mining trucks weighing in at hundreds of tons, the slightest decrease in road quality can translate to major expenses – a 1% rolling resistance increase brought about by natural erosion, for instance, will manifest as increased fuel expenses, increased truck maintenance costs, slower cycle times and lower productivity.

This means a haul road’s structural integrity and overall performance needs to be regularly assessed in order to maintain optimal hauling conditions. With traditional haul road inspection this would require surveyors and other personnel to be on or near the roadways, slowing trucks and presenting significant danger to drivers as well as inspection personnel.

With an automated drone, preplanned inspections can easily be flown, with automatic data processing producing digital elevation models with a level of precision that could never be obtained by human surveyors. These essential inspections can be completed more often, with more detail, without interrupting haul road traffic, allowing issues to quickly be identified and rectified or prevented altogether.

Quick fixes

As mentioned above, a great deal of the quality decrease on a haul road can be hard to detect because it’s so subtle. But some of it isn’t, and it can create major traffic issues. When damage occurs it needs to quickly be identified and assessed to allow for the fastest possible repairs.

An automated drone with swappable sensors can be launched on-demand to transmit images, video or create surface models to provide haul road engineers with as much information as possible without the delays associated with sending personnel to the scene, not to mention the dangers those employees would otherwise face on the roadway.

Emergency response

Quick identification of damage as well as quick repairs go a long way towards keeping haul roads safe. However, no matter how pristine the roads are kept and how careful drivers and other personnel are, it’s an unfortunate fact of mining that accidents and incidents can happen. This is perhaps where the on-demand abilities of an automated drone are the most invaluable.

An automated drone can be automatically and immediately dispatched to an incident or accident site, transmitting essential imagery and other information including chemical spill or leakage detection to operators and emergency response teams. Considering haul truck payload weight as well as the fuel and other potentially dangerous substances being transported, every minute counts when it comes to emergency response, and the time spent waiting for a drone pilot to respond or for a drone battery or sensor to be manually changed could mean the difference between life and death on a haul road. If for no other reason, this should make automation the only option when it comes to drone use in mining.

The future of hauling

Hauling operations at open pit mines are one part of the mining process that seems ripe for innovation. The potential for improvements to the process of keeping ore flowing smoothly through a mine site are exciting, and it remains to be seen how exactly automation revolutionizes these operations. For now, mine operators are likely happy to settle for improvements to haul road inspections. Improved safety and efficiency are of paramount importance to the current hauling process, and nothing makes these improvements as easily obtainable as automated drones.

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