The key aspect of the project was to develop autonomous carbon neutral mining processes. This includes the use of battery-electric mining equipment, full utilization of 5G for optimal connectivity, positioning, autonomous material handling, AI powered traffic and fleet control and collaboration among machines.
The project focused on the scale-up of promising technologies and demonstrating their potential at mining pilots which will provide the mining industry with the necessary means of addressing the future challenges in sustainable mining. As an addition to the pilots, the project included design thinking activities that set the strategies for future mining regarding mining workplaces on human terms and safe introduction of autonomous carbon neutral mining machines.
The project also focused on the mine worker of the future – ‘the modern miner’ -and safety, for example by developing autonomous mine inspection technology.
The project aimed to automate the unit operations and as such lead to efficient future mining. The fundamental technological blocks of the project focused on integrating, evolving, and realizing them in three main demonstration pilots. These pilots focused on automating the material handling process within the mine. This was successfully demonstrated at Agnico Eagle mine in northern part of Finland.
The following pilots were included and successfully demonstrated (pilot) in a real mining environment.
1.Robotized measurement inspection before and after blasting. The robotized measurement inspections based on advanced autonomous robots (drones) that has the capability to be deployed after the event of a blasting to perform the task of visual inspection and monitoring of the blasting area, analyze gas measurements, and evaluate the overall safety of the working after blast.
2. Autonomous Material handling at the face. To transport blasted material from draw-point to ore-repository autonomously using battery powered machines running in fully autonomous mode without human interaction.
3.Logistics (mixed traffic scenarios) The ore transportation demonstrated for managed mixed traffic. The definition of managed mixed traffic in this project are manually operated machines equipped with sensors and related technology to simulate automated machines operated in a mixed traffic environment. This performed in a restricted area within the test mine for safety reasons.
The pilots were all based on previous or ongoing development by project partners, either in EU, national or privately funded projects and finished on a TRL-level of 6-7 during the project.
To enable a battery powered machine to be autonomous in its cycle of performing the charging of the battery becomes central. In this project, we developed options of concept and specifically investigate in a concept to charge the battery autonomously. The concept developed will be a future enabler for the fully autonomous battery-charging concept within a mine.
The participating mining companies made available a total of six different demonstration sites covering different types of geological conditions, ores and mining methods, ensuring that the developed technology is broadly applicable and commercially viable.
