A squadron of drones at the BHP Billiton-managed Goonyella coalmine near Moranbah in central Queensland is radically changing the way in which miners keep physical tabs on their operations, traditionally the preserve of the mining surveyors’ profession. The first of the drones — or more correctly unmanned aerial vehicles — arrived at the BHP Mitsubishi Alliance-owned Goonyella a little more than a year ago.
Dubbed Virgil after the logistics character in Thunderbirds and sporting $2 stick-on cat’s eyes to keep the local hawks at bay, it has been joined by seven others in BMA’s growing squadron. Weighing 2.5kg and looking more like a hobbyist’s model aeroplane than the more ubiquitous hovering helicopter type of drone, the German-built and battery-powered UAVs have a flight time of up to 40 minutes, fly at up to 80km/h at a height of 120 metres, and can cover 80ha of the mining lease in a single flight.
After a flight plan is uploaded on to a memory card, the UAVs take flight for their rapid-fire collection of the type of volumetric measurements (by taking overlapping photos which can be data crunched into a 3D model) that a team of surveyors would have laboured to collect in the past. Project leader Jason Wadsworth told The Weekend Australian that the UAVs gather volumetric information “so we can understand the progress of the mining operation around the pits”.
“We get a tonne of information from the UAVs and it is giving our engineers and operators better visibility about what is going on site at any time,” Mr Wadsworth said.
“And now we are starting to venture into its safety compliance aspects, so we can monitor and understand where we might have problems with safety berms, road construction and that type of thing.’’ “It is about making sure the site (the mining lease is 30km long and 20km wide) meets its specifications. “The UAVs don’t need to go down to the pits, and they don’t need to integrate with the equipment down there which is good for safety, and it has productivity benefits.”
Mining surveyors are far from losers in the technology shift as apart from anything else, they are the ground-based pilots of the airborne workhorses — after obtaining a remote pilot aircraft systems licence for drones weighing up to 5kg. Sometimes referring to themselves as spatial scientists but unkindly referred to as “peg whackers’’ by other professions on mine sites, mine surveyors are climbing the respect totem pole thanks to the game-changing impact of the UAVs.
It reflects the capability of the UAVs, with Goonyella specialist mine planner Ben Skerman saying that there was a “lot of excitement about what this system can do”. “That’s because we can get the information quickly, it’s accurate and it gives us the opportunity to see things in ways we have never seen before,” Mr Skerman said. “So there is a real buzz around what this can do. As the technology evolves, we know these things are going to get better.’’
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