JOHN A. MEECH
Professor of Mining Engineering and Director of CERM3
2011 MINE432 Mining Robot Demonstration
The 2011 MINE432 Mining Robot Demonstration was a great success. A total of 5 teams did extremely well in preparing their robots to demonstrate an aspect of mining that could benefit from the use of robots.
Team 1 focused on Mine Rescue using two robots - one to scout out the damaged workings, communicate back to a surface base, and then a second robot is sent out to remove any barriers that impede the rescue operations and to recover uninjured and injured miners. A combination of autonomous and telerobotics methods were used.
Team 2 had their robots simulate the underground sequencing of drilling, loading, blasting, scaling, and mucking using both autonomous and telerobots. Both telerobotics and autonomous operations were demonstrated.
Team 3 simulated an open pit shovel-truck haulage system with a front-end loader moving ore and waste from a muck pile to two positions where trucks queued to move ore or waste to the respective crusher or waste dump. This system operated in a fully-autonomous way, in which the loader was able to distinguish ore (red mints) from waste (green mints) and deliver its load to the correct haulage truck queue.
Team 4 demonstrated a bulk mining system removing ore from a pillar using a block caving method with the ore being loaded into trucks on a haul route underneath. The system also functioned in a fully-autonomous fashion.
Team 5 demonstrated a series of robots drilling a face, then loading with explosives and then clearing the haulage route prior to blasting - all done autonomously, although some manual intervention was required to complete the demo.
Demonstration Videos
Caution: these files are large!Team 1 Video: Team 1 - Mine Rescue
Team 2 Video: Team 2 - Underground Mining
Team 3 Video: Team 3 - Open Pit Mining
Team 4 Video: Team 4 - Block Caving
Team 5 Video: Team 5 - Underground Drilling and Blasting
Team Members:
Team 1
Lead: Taylor Scurr
Second: Diane Trieu
Members:
Wayne Lee
Mike Meyers
Jason Lu
John Wang
Team 2:
Lead: Rob Moonen
Second: Mo Xue
Members:
Ian Morrison
Dan Panazzo
Matt Estepho
Craig Archibald
Team 3:
Lead: Morgan Power
Second: Niko Heir
Members:
Alex Frey
Matt Graham
Johnson Rae
Anthony Rahardjo
Aaron Wright
Team 4:
Lead: Malcolm Brodie
Second: Kyle Buckoll
Members:
Bryan Strahl
Ram Rattanpal
Kevin Rush
Jeff LaMarsh
Team 5:
Lead: Cam Bruin
Second: Alex Clow
Members:
Andrea Leung
Jon Leung
Frank Tu
Joel Yue
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