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Products and services banner Mine communication & tracking systems Recent development in SLAM technology and its impact on mine automation T here is no doubt that automation is the future of mining operations in Australia. Successful development and deployment of automation technology will allow surface and underground mining to be carried out more effi ciently, safely, and with less human intervention than is currently required. However, the performance and nature of this technology will rely upon the developments made in a number of related areas: communications, logistics, human factors, geosensing, and fi eld robotics. Field robotics or robotics for unstructured and dynamic environments such as mining, (the area of expertise of the author) is experiencing unprecedented growth around the world with Australia playing a leading role. Over that last 18 years, CSIRO has been involved in numerous automation projects, investigating, developing and demonstrating the feasibility of automating mining equipment, such as automation of: highwall miners, dragline swing, Load Haul Dump (LHD) vehicle, explosive loading, rope shovel, coal longwall process, tele-robotic rockbreaker, hot metal carrier). Today, CSIRO's Minerals Down Under Flagship (MDU) is researching the technology challenges that will face the "Future Mine". To help in this research, the automation of mining equipment can be divided into three tasks: • Navigation – the task of controlling the movement of a vehicle from one point to another (i.e. the task of haulage: haul trucks and LHDs). • Manipulation – the task of handling objects; picking, insertion, modifi cation, or destruction (i.e. the tasks of drilling, explosive loading or rock-breaking). • Excavation – the task of digging, moving or removing material (i.e. the control of draglines, shovels, dozers, front and backhoe loaders – Figure 1). These tasks can be further divided into four processes (Figure 2): 1. Sensing – hardware that provides information about the state of the robot and its environment (e.g. encoders, inertial, GPS, video, Lidar, radar). 2. Perception – software that acquires and processes the sensing data into a model of itself and the environment that the robot can understand. 3. Control – software that commands the actions of the robot (e.g. optimal path planning, obstacle avoidance). 4. Actuation – hardware that produces an action (e.g. electric motors, pneumatic and hydraulic actuators). Traditionally, the greatest challenge in fi eld robotics has been the selection of sensors that will survive in the harsh outdoor environment. In such an environment, it is necessary to install additional sensors (with different modes of operation) to ensure that robots have the ability to detect the failure of their own sensors and actuators (providing redundancy and closed loop control). Given the Figure 1. CSIRO's Autonomous Loader 30 The Australasian Mine Safety Journal Spring 2011