Drone safety monitoring systems for Arctic mining (KO 5080)
Funded by Kolarctic CBC 2014-2020

Objective of the project

The project deals with safety ensuring of the mining industry workers. Though modern industry is quite developed, accidents, health problems, and sudden challenging situations still occur. These situations can also increase the load on natural environment (negatively affect the state of groundwaters etc.), influence the health of local inhabitants and disturb production while it takes a long time to study what has been happening and how wide is the effect. The drone technology can give an added value to solve this problem. Since DROSAMO is a micro-project, the upper level aim was to create a concrete base in terms of drone research, understanding the market industrial needs, idea development plans for drones based on the needs, and preliminary drone demonstrations and simulations

Main activities

Partnership creation for future actions, mapping of market needs and developing the idea further, simulations and organizing a demo.

Achievements

Through the DROSAMO market analysis across Kolarctic regions, there were similarities found in terms common requirements from the hazardous industries like: (1) Safety of workers, (2) Optimized Environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures, (3) Protective and preventive measures, and (4) Need to study the concentration of pollutants in the atmosphere in hazardous environments. Autonomous navigation and mapping demonstrations were tested in an underground mining environment (Using thermal cameras, sensors, SLAM tech, 3D scanners) to detect human beings and conduct 3D navigation of the mine environment. This ensured robust and reliable autonomous navigation in a GPS denied and toxic environment mine to address the safety challenges of workers. Further strategies for collecting data for the EIA process in mines and formulating proactive maintenance strategies in mines were elaborated. To address the challenge on estimating the air pollution levels in Apatity city, the DROSAMO team conducted CFD modelling of atmospheric pollution processes by numerical modeling. This gave good insight analysis of the predicted values of dust concentration levels (dust particle size up to 20 μm).