2019 Big Sky GeoCon

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly being used in underground mining as a way to improve the safety of mine personnel. In comparison to traditional data collection tools, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to collect versatile data in inaccessible areas of a mine using technologies such as photogrammetry and LiDAR. Spatially accurate 3D point clouds can then be built that provide important geotechnical information for interpretation including the ability to measure discontinuity orientation, inspect rock properties, and record the geometry in an area. Due to the difficulty of flying UAVs in the underground environment, the focus of this investigation was on UAVs with enhanced navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities. Four teams individually participated in a series of underground flight demonstrations at Barrick’s Golden Sunlight Mine to test the abilities of their enhanced systems in challenging environments. The flight demonstrations semi-autonomous flights in drifts, stopes, and ventilation raises both within and beyond line-of-sight. Many of the UAVs carried a LiDAR scanner that was used for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), which allows a vehicle to create a map of its surroundings while also locating itself within that map. Throughout the demonstrations, the data collected included video footage that was used to build photogrammetric point clouds, as well as LiDAR point clouds from the flight. The accuracy of the photogrammetry point clouds were quantitatively and qualitatively compared to the LiDAR point clouds to assess the potential applications for the data sets that were collected.