Can you find your way?

MCE

September 17, 2019

A disruptive innovation that enables a paradigm shift in underground positioning

Can you find your way? Well, if you are an experienced miner you probably do – anyway, most of the time. On the other hand, if you are not familiar with the mine – maybe you are a new employee, a sub-contractor, a short-term temporary employee or simply just an employee that is not in the mine on regular basis, it is not always so easy to find your way around in the darkness. Many times, you might need the assistance from an experienced miner as a guide to learn your ways in the mine for some time. The drawback is that it needs two persons for the same job during training.

Can you find your way?

Moreover, even if you are an experienced miner, what if you want to try and locate a moving machine that you shall repair? In fact, finding equipment and machines is one of the common sources for wasted time in mining. From a recent analysis in Canada, it was shown that 75% of the time – looking for equipment would take anywhere from 20 min – 2 hours, and the remaining 25% greater than 2 hours to several shifts. This represented a significant loss of productive time in a typical 12-hour shift and is common problem of most mines in the world.

Even if you are lucky that there is a mining operations centre with a centralized tracking system that you can call and ask for help, there is still a tough task for new people to find the correct way.

Luckily, these problems can now easily be mitigated with the advent of a new revolutionary product called Mobilaris Onboard™. With the Mobilaris Onboard™, running on a standard Android tablet, any miner will be able to know what´s going on in the mine. Whether you would like to know the ETA of a certain mine truck, the location of a drill rig, the whereabouts of a maintenance personnel or the location of a water pump, you will now be able to have all information at your fingertips. The Mobilaris Onboard™ gets all the real-time information about personnel, equipment and vehicles from the centralized Mobilaris Mining Intelligence™ solution. All information including mine maps is shown in 3D and is locally stored persistently so that you can use it even when you are out of network coverage.

As icing on the cake, the Mobilaris Onboard™ is equipped with a unique and disruptive positioning algorithm called Mobilaris Hybrid Positioning™ (Pat Pend).

This unique innovation is based upon cutting edge sensor fusion, artificial intelligence, advanced mathematics and allows for self-sustained positioning of a vehicle with 5-10 meters accuracy without any dedicated infrastructure for positioning. It does not require any specialized or costly hardware. Instead, it is designed to run on a standard Android tablet.

Our own experience together with testimonials from customers makes us totally convinced that this new disruptive innovation will dramatically change underground mining.

Just like a GPS enabled car navigator, now anyone can navigate to a location or to a moving asset without any specific knowledge about the mine. The best route will be highlighted in the 3D map for easy turn-by-turn navigation.

If there is a network connection available, the precise position of the vehicle is sent to the Mobilaris Mining Intelligence™ system so it can be seen by everyone else.

As we said in the beginning, investigations have shown that one big reason for wasted time is that it takes a long time for personnel to find equipment at the start of the shift or for maintenance/repair. Now with Mobilaris Onboard™ this is not a problem anymore, even for moving targets such as trucks in operation.

Another good example is that at line-up meetings, supervisors primarily describe verbally where a piece of equipment of tool can be found. The description is usually loose in detail, with no visual aids or data on specific location. This further exacerbates the problem in looking for equipment, especially non routine items like rammer jammers, switch boxes, power cables, drill gear boxes etc. Power cable is an excellent example of a piece of equipment available the last shift worked, but “walked away” on the next shift as another job/crew required use of the cable. The return shift now arrives expecting the cable to be there, now realizing it is gone and now an additional cable (or the existing one) needs to be found.

The usage of Mobilaris Onboard™ would greatly reduce this waste of time as exact location can be prescribed and visually presented in a line-up meeting as well as the optimal route can be visualized in vehicles.

In fact, giving the Mobilaris Onboard™ to miners will dramatically increase transparency and empowerment.