Efficient Inspection, Enhanced Safety

By eliminating the involvement of humans (employees), the deployment of drones in underground inspection enhances safety and improves efficiency. Using reliable tools such as LiDAR and SLAM, drones can obtain high-quality images that help mine managers make informed decisions.

obtained are relevant and reliable, as dronebased surveying solutions providers recently told this publication.

A necessity

The significance of drones becomes better comprehended when the myriad of challenges that businesses face in the contemporary operating environment. The challenges can be narrowed down to the twin objectives of onerous compliance requirements (ESG, Occupational Health and Safety in the main), above and beyond ensuring the long-term sustainability of a business.

The surefire way they can meet the abovementioned objectives and prevail is through digitising workflow and operations to enhance efficiency and reduce environmental footprint (emissions), removing or minimising as many as possible humans from hazardous situations. Concerning inspection, the ready availability of advanced drone technology has become a lowhanging fruit right within their grasp.

By Nick Barnes

In mining jurisdictions throughout the continent, recent changes in legislation governing health and safety indicate that authorities (regulators) have assumed a zero-tolerance stance toward safety breaches in mining. Ideally, this obligates mining companies to comply at all costs. However, in reality, unavoidably, there are some areas where mining companies might lack capacity, rendering them vulnerable to high levels of safety risks and potential breaches.

Interestingly, the passing of stringent legislation has coincided with the exponential advancement of a wide spectrum of technologies. The use of some of the technologies has significantly lightened the burden on mining companies of meeting compliance requirements.

Removing human involvement

Mainly, technology has enabled mining companies to remove human involvement in some critical functions, minimising safety risks.

On the whole, the exploration of drone technology can help meet the objective of enhancing safety and improving efficiency in underground mining operations. This task would be difficult to accomplish by assigning employees. Conventionally, these tasks have involved the physical presence of employees.

Drones in underground surveying One of the innovations that is having a groundbreaking impact is drone technology. Among a host of other fields, the versatility of drone technology has revolutionalised how surveys of underground mining environments are performed. These are areas such as stopes and voids, mine shafts and abandoned declines, as well as potentially harmful environments that arise from post-blast situations.

Typically, when conducting surveys in underground environments, inherent risks, deploying employees poses a big dilemma. As an alternative, handily, when deployed properly, drones perform the duty capably in rugged duties. They eliminate the concern of the risk of harm or injuries to workers while acquiring vital data in high-wall precision scanning. And the results, in terms of the volumes of images

LiDAR and SLAM enhance dronebased inspection

Global positioning systems have limited scope in some areas of the underground environment. Handily, as alternatives, simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technologies have opened up new opportunities. Based on results from recent surveys conducted in African mining, LiDAR and SLAM drones can produce high-resolution images of their high-value, mission-critical assets. Vitally, clients can visualise and map inaccessible areas. The data computed from the images help mining houses make informed decisions on their assets.