DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR THE SHUTTLE CAR IN UNDERGROUND ROOM & PILLAR COAL MINES

In recent years, autonomous solutions in the multi-disciplinary field of the mining engineering have been an extremely popular applied research topic. The growing demand for mineral supplies combined with the steady decline in the available surface reserves has driven the mining industry to mine deeper underground deposits. These deposits are difficult to access, and the environment may be hazardous to mine personnel (e.g., increased heat, difficult ventilation conditions, etc.). Moreover, current mining methods expose the miners to numerous occupational hazards such as working in the proximity of heavy mining equipment, possible roof falls, as well as noise and dust. As a result, the mining industry, in its efforts to modernize and advance its methods and techniques, is one of the many industries that has turned to autonomous systems. Vehicle automation in such complex working environments can play a critical role in improving worker safety and mine productivity. One of the most time-consuming tasks of the mining cycle is the transportation of the extracted ore from the face to the main haulage facility or to surface processing facilities. Although conveyor belts have long been the autonomous transportation means of choice, there are still many cases where a discrete transportation system is needed to transport materials from the face to the main haulage system. The current dissertation presents the development of a navigation system for an autonomous shuttle car (ASC) in underground room and pillar coal mines. By introducing autonomous shuttle cars, the operator can be relocated from the dusty, noisy, and potentially dangerous environment of the underground mine to the safer location of a control room. This dissertation focuses on the development and testing of an autonomous navigation system for an underground room and pillar coal mine. A simplified relative localization system which determines the location of the vehicle relatively to salient features derived from on-board 2D LiDAR scans was developed for a semi-autonomous laboratory-scale shuttle car prototype. This simplified relative localization system is heavily dependent on and at the same time leverages the room and pillar geometry. Instead of keeping track of a global position of the vehicle relatively to a fixed coordinates frame, the proposed custom localization technique requires information regarding only the immediate surroundings. The followed approach enables the prototype to navigate around the pillars in real-time using a deterministic Finite-State Machine which models the behavior of the vehicle in the room and pillar mine with only a few states. Also, a user centered GUI has been developed that allows for a human user to control and monitor the autonomous vehicle by implementing the proposed navigation system. Experimental tests have been conducted in a mock mine in order to evaluate the performance of the developed system. A number of different scenarios simulating common missions that a shuttle car needs to undertake in a room and pillar mine. The results show a minimum success ratio of 70%

Laser beams-based localization methods for Boom-type roadheader using underground camera non-uniform blur model

The efficiency of automatic underground tunneling is significantly depends on the localization accuracy and reliable for the Boom-type roadheader. In comparison with other underground equipment positioning methods, vision-based measurement has gained attention for its advantages of noncontact and no accumulated error. However, the harsh underground environment, especially the geometric errors brought by the vibration of the machine body to the underground camera model, has a certain influence on the accuracy and stability for the vision-based underground localization. In this paper, a laser beams-based localization methods for the machine body of Boom-type roadheader is presented, which can tackle the dense-dust, low illumination environment with the stray lights interference. Taking mining vibration into consideration, an underground camera non-uniform blur model that incorporate the two-layer glasses refraction effect was established to eliminate vibration errors. The blur model explicitly reveals the change of imaging optical path under the influence of vibration and double layer explosion-proof glass. On the basis of this, the underground laser beams extraction and positioning are presents, which is with well environmental adaptability, and the improved 2P3L (two-points-three-lines) localization model from line correspondences are developed. Experimental evaluation are designed to verify the performance of the proposed method, and the deblurring algorithm is investigated and evaluated. The results show that the proposed methods is effective to restore the blurred laser beams image that caused by the vibration, and can meet the precision need of roadheader body localization for roadway construction in coal mine

A Mine Main Fans Switchover System with Lower Air Flow Volatility based on Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

A reliable ventilation system is essential for maintaining a comfortable working environment and ensuring safety production in an underground coal mine. The automated fan switchover technique was developed for changing the main fan for maintenance with lower air flow volatility of underground mine in the switchover process. This article established the optimization model in the main fans switchover process, used the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the model, and achieved minimum air flow volatility in the fans switchover process. Compared to previous studies, computer simulations have shown that the proposed algorithm can effectively find the global optimal solution with less initial parameters and achieved lower air flow volatility in underground mine. The particle swarm optimization solution, searching diversity, prevents it from confining to local optimal solutions and enhances convergence. The reasonable step length is beneficial to reduce the air flow volatility and main fans switchover time. The air flow volatility is larger comparatively when some doors are nearly open or closed fully at the start—stop phase of the switchover process. A case application in a China\u27s domestic coal mine shows that the air flow volatility of the underground mine in the main fans switchover process is no more than 0.4%

CONCEPTS FOR DEVELOPMENT OF SHUTTLE CAR AUTONOMOUS DOCKING WITH CONTINUOUS MINER USING 3-D DEPTH CAMERA

In recent years, a great deal of work has been conducted in automating mining equipment with the goals of increasing worker health and safety and increasing mine productivity. Automating vehicles such as load-haul-dumps been successful even in underground environments where the use of global positioning systems are unavailable. This thesis addresses automating the operation of a shuttle car, specifically focusing on positioning the shuttle car under the continuous miner coal-discharge conveyor during cutting and loading operations. This task requires recognition of the target and precise control of the tramming operation because a specific orientation and distance from the coal discharge conveyor is needed to avoid coal spillage. The proposed approach uses a stereo depth camera mounted on a small-scale mockup of a shuttle car. Machine learning algorithms are applied to the camera output to identify the continuous miner coal-discharge conveyor and segment the scene into various regions such as roof, ribs, and personnel. This information is used to plan the shuttle car path to the continuous miner coal-discharge conveyor. These methods are currently applied on 1/6th scale continuous miner and shuttle car in an appropriately scaled mock mine

Dragline excavation simulation, real-time terrain recognition and object detection

The contribution of coal to global energy is expected to remain above 30% through 2030. Draglines are the preferred excavation equipment in most surface coal mines. Recently, studies toward dragline excavation efficiency have focused on two specific areas. The first area is dragline bucket studies, where the goal is to develop new designs which perform better than conventional buckets. Drawbacks in the current approach include operator inconsistencies and the inability to physically test every proposed design. Previous simulation models used Distinct Element Methods (DEM) but they over-predict excavation forces by 300% to 500%. In this study, a DEM-based simulation model has been developed to predict bucket payloads within a 16.55% error. The excavation model includes a novel method for calibrating formation parameters. The method combines DEM-based tri-axial material testing with the XGBoost machine learning algorithm to achieve prediction accuracies of between 80.6% and 95.54%. The second area is dragline vision studies towards efficient dragline operation. Current dragline vision models use image segmentation methods that are neither scalable nor multi-purpose. In this study, a scalable and multi-purpose vision model has been developed for draglines using Convolutional Neural Networks. This vision system achieves an 87.32% detection rate, 80.9% precision and 91.3% recall performance across multiple operation tasks. The main novelty of this research includes the bucket payload prediction accuracy, formation parameter calibration and the vision system accuracy, precision and recall performance toward improving dragline operating efficiencies --Abstract, page iii

A review of laser scanning for geological and geotechnical applications in underground mining

Laser scanning can provide timely assessments of mine sites despite adverse challenges in the operational environment. Although there are several published articles on laser scanning, there is a need to review them in the context of underground mining applications. To this end, a holistic review of laser scanning is presented including progress in 3D scanning systems, data capture/processing techniques and primary applications in underground mines. Laser scanning technology has advanced significantly in terms of mobility and mapping, but there are constraints in coherent and consistent data collection at certain mines due to feature deficiency, dynamics, and environmental influences such as dust and water. Studies suggest that laser scanning has matured over the years for change detection, clearance measurements and structure mapping applications. However, there is scope for improvements in lithology identification, surface parameter measurements, logistic tracking and autonomous navigation. Laser scanning has the potential to provide real-time solutions but the lack of infrastructure in underground mines for data transfer, geodetic networking and processing capacity remain limiting factors. Nevertheless, laser scanners are becoming an integral part of mine automation thanks to their affordability, accuracy and mobility, which should support their widespread usage in years to come

Voice Over Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have traditionally focused on low duty-cycle applications where sensor data are reported periodically in the order of seconds or even longer. This is due to typically slow changes in physical variables, the need to keep node costs low and the goal of extending battery lifetime. However, there is a growing need to support real-time streaming of audio and/or low-rate video even in wireless sensor networks for use in emergency situations and shortterm intruder detection. In this paper, we describe a real-time voice stream-capability in wireless sensor networks and summarize our deployment experiences of voice streaming across a large sensor network of FireFly nodes in an operational coal mine. FireFly is composed of several integrated layers including specialized low-cost hardware, a sensor network operating system, a real-time link layer and network scheduling. We are able to provide efficient support for applications with timing constraints by tightly coupling the network and task scheduling with hardware-based global time synchronization. We use this platform to support 2-way audio streaming concurrently with sensing tasks. For interactive voice, we investigate TDMA-based slot scheduling with balanced bi-directional latency while meeting audio timeliness requirements. Finally, we describe our experimental deployment of 42 nodes in a coal mine, and present measurements of the end-to-end throughput, jitter, packet loss and voice quality

Seismic signal segmentation procedure using time-frequency decomposition and statistical modelling

In the paper a novel automatic seismic signal segmentation procedure is proposed. This procedure is motivated by analysis of real seismic vibration signals acquired in an underground mine. During regular mining activities in the underground mine one can expect some seismic events which appear just after the mining activity, e.g. blasting procedures, provoked relaxation of rock and some events that are unexpected, like natural rock burst. It often happens that, during one signal realization, several shocks (events) appear. Apart from two main sources of events (i.e. rock burst and blasting), other activities in the mine might also initiate seismic signal recording procedure (for example machine moving nearby the sensor). Obviously, significance of each type of recorded signal is very different, its shape in time domain, energy and frequency structure (i.e. spectrum of the signal) are different. In order to recognize these events automatically, recorded observation should be pre-processed in order to isolate a single event. The problem of signal segmentation is investigated in literature, several application domains might be found. Although, there are just a few works on seismic signal segmentation. In this paper we propose to use a time-frequency decomposition of the signal and model each sub-signal at every frequency bin using statistical methods. Narrowband components are much easier to search for so called structural breakpoint, i.e. time instance when properties of signal significantly change. It is obvious that simple energy-based methods applied to raw signal fail when one event begins before the previous one relaxed. In order to find beginning and end of a single event we propose to use measures based on empirical quantiles estimated for each sub-signal and, finally, aggregate 2D array into 1D probability vector which indicates location where statistical features has switched from one regime to another one. The proposed procedure can be applied in order to improve time domain isolation of single event for the case, when duration of signal acquisition is longer than duration of the event or to isolate single event from sequence of events (recorded for example during blasting)

Evolution, Monitoring and Predicting Models of Rockburst: Precursor Information for Rock Failure

Load/unload response ratio predicting of rockburst; Three-dimensional reconstruction of fissured rock; Nonlinear dynamics evolution pattern of rock cracks; Bayesian model for predicting rockburs