The first conference on Real-Time Mining is bringing together individuals and companies working on EU-sponsored projects to exchange knowledge and rise synergies in resource extraction innovation. The topics include: • Resource Modelling and Value of Information; • Automated Material Characterization; • Positioning and Material Tracking; • Process Optimization; • Data Management. The conference has been initiated by the consortium of the EU H2020 funded project Real-Time Mining as a platform for inter-project communication and for communication with project stakeholders. It brings together several European research projects in the field of industry 4.0 applied to mineral resource extraction. These are the projects VAMOS, SOLSA and UNEXMIN.

The flow of information, and consequently the decision-making along the chain of mining from exploration to beneficiation, typically occurs in a discontinuous fashion over long timespans. In addition, due to the uncertain nature of the knowledge about deposits and the inherent spatial distribution of material characteristics, actual production performance often deviates from expectations. Reconciliation exercises to adjust mineral resource and reserve models and planning assumptions are performed with timely lags of weeks, months or even years.

Combined mineralogical and chemical analyses on drill cores are highly demanded by mining and metallurgical companies to speed up exploration, mining and define geometallurgical parameters for beneficiation. Furthermore, high quality coherent and complete drill cores are needed to obtain reliable analyses for more accurate geomodels, resource and reserve estimates. At present, analyses are done by exploiting only a single technique, such as hyperspectral imaging, XRF or LIBS. The coupling of different analytical instruments is still a technological challenge. The SOLSA project, sponsored by the EU-H2020 Raw Material program, targets to construct an expert system coupling sonic drilling with XRF, XRD, hyperspectral imaging and Raman spectroscopy. This paper will present the 4-years project in progress, a general, almost mid-term, state-of-the-art.

The 42-month ¡VAMOS! project (Viable Alternative Mine Operating System, Grant Agreement 642477, vamos-project.eu), co-funded by the European Commission’s Horizon2020 programme, will enable access to reserves of mineral deposits by developing an innovative, safe, clean, and low-visibility underwater inland mining technique. Through field-testing, ¡VAMOS! hopes to encourage investment in abandoned and prospective EU open-pit mines by providing a viable novel excavation process, ultimately aiming to reduce the EU’s reliance on imports of strategically important raw materials. The project will test the technological and economic viability of the underwater mining of inland mineral deposits which are currently economically, technologically, and environmentally unobtainable. If proven viable, ¡VAMOS! will enable access to deposits whose excavation has been historically limited by stripping ratio and hydrological and geotechnical considerations. Also, due to low noise and dust levels, and its road-transportable electric-powered system, ¡VAMOS! will be able to be applied safely in both urban-proximal and hard-to-access rural locations. ¡VAMOS! is defined by a remotely-operated underwater mining vehicle, adapted and improved from existing subsea mining technology. Operating in tandem with a remote-controlled sensory assistance-vehicle, the underwater miner will connect to a flexible riser through which mined material will be pumped from the mudline to a land-based dewatering pit via a floating mobile deployment-platform. On the deployment platform, a bypass system will be linked to production measuring equipment and a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy system, enabling throughput monitoring and real-time grade-control. Preparatory work has been carried out to assess the regulatory compliance of the project, its likely social and environmental impact, and the steps which need to be taken to reduce and quantify these during testing. Two community stakeholder workshops held in both England and Portugal have indicated that the public is receptive to the concept. Following an official project design-freeze in October 2016, construction and integration of all components will conclude in June 2017. This will be followed by field-testing at a flooded kaolin-granite quarry in Devon, England in October 2017, with further testing planned at a flooded iron mine in Vareš, Bosnia in June 2018.

UNEXMIN (Underwater Explorer for Flooded Mines, Grant Agreement No. 690008, www.unexmin.eu) is a project funded by the European Commission’s HORIZON2020 Framework Programme. The project is developing a multi-platform robotic system for the autonomous exploration and mapping of flooded underground mines. The robotic system – UX-1 – will use non-invasive methods for the 3D mapping of abandoned underground flooded mines, bringing new important geological data that currently cannot be obtained by other means without having significant costs and safety risks. The deployment of a multi-robotic system in a confined and unknown environment poses challenges to the autonomous operation of the robot, and there is a risk of damaging the equipment and the mine itself. Key challenges are related to 1) structural design for robustness and resilience, 2) localization, navigation and 3D mapping, 3) guidance, propulsion and control, 4) autonomous operation and supervision, 5) data processing, interpretation and evaluation. Underwater environments constrain basic robotic functions as well as the size and weight of any operable robot. The limiting factors in these environments influence the type and amount of equipment able to be mounted onto a robotic system. Crucial abilities for an underwater robot’s functionality include unobstructed movement, autonomy, mapping and environmental awareness. To enable these critical functions, we employ components such as cameras, SONAR, thrusters, structured-light laser scanners, and on-board computers, rechargeable batteries and protective pressure hulls. In UNEXMIN, additional underwater instrumentation is being developed to measure pH, pressure, temperature, water chemistry and conductivity, magnetic fields, and gamma radiation levels. An on-board geophysical system will enable sub-bottom profiling, and multispectral and UV fluorescence imaging units are being installed for mineralogical identification. All these tailor-made instruments are been tested in laboratory and real environment conditions.

Mining is one of the oldest activities of humanity, as the extraction of stones, ceramics and metals proved to be essential to develop tools and weapons and to drive forward human civilisation. Possibly the oldest mine – the “Lion Cave” – dates back to 41 000 BC. Located in Swaziland, its pre-historic operators mined haematite to make red-pigment ochre. The mine was likely in operation until 23 000 BC and at least 1200 tons of soft haematite had been removed in this timespan. As time progressed, mining diversified and production methods improved. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans mined different minerals, such as malachite, copper and gold. Philipp II, the father of Alexander the Great, is believed of having conquered gold mines in Thrace, which provided him with 1000 talents (26 tons) of gold per year. Needless to say that Alexander’s conquests would have not been possible without these extensive mining operations. Over the ages, mining activities continued to intensify. Today, a tier-one open-pit copper mine like Chuquicamata in Chuquicamata, Chile, with a depth of 900 m, provides for a production of 443,000 tons of copper and 20,000 tons of molybdenum p.a. Naturally such levels of production come with a price tag. Thousands of workers, numerous heavy machines and investments that go into the millions and billions are required to set up a mine and to maintain its operation. At the same time large amounts of waste – the so-called tailings – are generated, often posing a significant environmental risk. The fact that ore yields have dramatically decreased over time has worsened the situation; today, the extraction of 1 ton of metal ore requires vast amounts of energy and can easily generate hundreds of tons of waste.iv Were it not for a significant technological progress in the extraction, transport and processing of the ores, today’s mining operations could not be sustained. Despite all these technological advances, the mining industry is at a decision point. The conventional trend of the last hundred years of counteracting shrinking ore yields by making the mining machinery faster and bigger is at its limits. Today’s ore haulers weigh as much as 600 tons and require a net engine power of 2722 kW v to sustain operation. At the same time waste heaps have grown larger and larger – operations are clearly at their physical limits. Time is running out for enhancements and improvements, if mining is to continue, a drastic paradigm shift seems to be the only solution. This paradigm shift will require humanity to mine more efficiently and intelligently, by aiming to extract only these rocks that contain the ore and doing so in a manner, which results in the smallest possible ecological footprint. This is where OffWorld’s Swarm Robotic Mining Architecture comes into play. The overarching purpose of OffWorld is to enable the human settlement of space by developing a new generation of small, smart, learning industrial robots. This robotic workforce has numerous things to do: build landing pads, excavate underground habitats, extract water ice and materials, make drinkable water, breathable air and rocket propellant, manufacture basic structures and solar cells, produce electricity, etc. OffWorld’s overall vision is to operate thousands of robots that can mine, manufacture and build on the Moon, the as-teroids and Mars. These robots need to be small and robust, extremely adaptable, modular and reconfigurable, autonomous and fast learning – they are lightyears ahead of the 2 million industrial robots that currently work in factories and warehouses. Space is a tough place. The environment is harsh, resources are limited and the room for errors is close to zero. If a robot can succeed in space than it can surely excel in the terrestrial industry as well. This and the fact that OffWorld builds a swarm approach that relies on a small form factor, intelligence and surgical precision, has the potential to reduce the total cost of operations, can shorten the life of mine or industrial operation and can be easily scaled up and down in size. With all these benefits in mind, OffWorld is looking into a reduction in the total cost of operations of at least an order of magnitude within any industrial sector. This paper will introduce the design philosophy behind OffWorld’s robotic work-force and will present the masterplan for developing space-bound systems by first maturing them in large scale deployments in terrestrial industries.

The SOLSA project aims to develop an innovative on-line-on-mine-real-time expert system, combining sonic drilling, mineralogical and chemical characterization and data treatment. Ideally, this combination, highly demanded by mining and metallurgical companies, will speed up exploration, mining and processing. In order to evaluate the instrumental parameters for the SOLSA expert system, portable and laboratory analyses have been performed on four samples with contrasting lithologies: siliceous breccia, serpentinized harzburgite, sandstone and granite. More precisely, we evaluated the influence of the surface state of the sample on the signals obtained by portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) for chemistry and portable Infra-Red spectroscopy (pIR) for mineralogy. In addition, laboratory Raman spectroscopy, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), XRF and ICP-OES laboratory analyses were performed to compare surface bulk mineralogical and chemical analyses. This presentation highlights (1) the importance of coupling chemical and mineralogical analytical technologies to obtain most complete information on samples, (2) the effect of the sample surface state on the XRF and IR signals from portable instruments. The last point is crucial for combined instrumental on-line sensor design and the calibration of the different instruments, especially in the case of pXRF.

For quite some time, there has been extensive research into different technologies for indoor positioning systems. Of these systems only a handful are suitable for employ in an underground mining environment. Especially as GPS is not available in underground environments, alternative systems need to be employed. Many of the currently available technologies lack the necessary precision and robustness needed to enable automation of mobile equipment. Modern approaches now look into combining different technologies to harness the best features of each candidate compensating for deficits of the other systems. In the Horizon 2020 funded Real-Time Mining research project, the Institute for Advanced Mining Technologies of RWTH Aachen University together with the Netherlands Organisation for applied scientific research (in Dutch: TNO) are also conducting research in this field. The goal is to develop an underground positioning system based on the combination of inertial measurement units (IMU), ultra-wideband radio technology (UWB) and geometrical sensors. While the partner TNO is developing a new IMU system based on the TNO DriftLess technology, RWTH Aachen University is focussing on the UWB part and laser-scanners. In the end, through shrewd sensor fusion the different technologies will be combined to enable precise localisation of mobile equipment in underground environments. Taking a closer look at the UWB technology, next to hardware and software developments, different measurement campaigns were undertaken during the time of this research project. It was found that the precision and accuracy as well as the robustness of the ultra-wideband radio technology is sufficient for the mining context. Hence, in this contribution, we will present our findings during the development of an underground localisation system for the ultra-wideband radio technology.

The main target of the UNEXMIN H2020 project (www.unexmin.eu) is to develop a fully autonomous submersible robot (UX-1) which can map flooded mine workings, and collect information about potential resources remaining in them. The most recent information about these abandoned mines could be more than 100 years old; some of them still could hold significant reserves of resources. To identify the ores/minerals in these mines many technological challenges have to be overcome: limited space and weigh for instrumentation, the UX-1 is continuously moving without contacting the mine walls and limited energy consumption because the whole robot is running only on its own battery pack. Multispectral imaging was selected as a feasible and promising method to characterize minerals. The often more than one metre of water severely limits the useful electromagnetic wave-lengths available for sensing, so the multispectral unit is designed to work between 400 to 850 nm where the water has acceptable transparency. The use of classical spectrometers is limited to single point measurements, the maximum that they can be used for is for line-scan, but this requires a powerful light source with high energy consumption. Even with the development of the 2D multispectral CCDs, there is no camera on the market which has the required channel number together with the required resolution. With the availability of high power, energy efficient monochromatic light sources (LEDs) which can be switched on and off with millisecond accuracy, the “reverse spectrometry” seems a good solution. This is where a sensitive, high resolution greyscale camera is used to record the different wavelengths in a sequence synchronized with the triggering of different wavelength light sources. The spectra of the individual points are built/ merged by the combination of the sequential images during post-processing and referred to every xyz-point. Because the mine waters can have very high dissolved ion content it can have very intense colour which can have strong effect on the measured mineral colour. Thus a reference path will be in the multispectral imaging unit continuously measuring the water transmittance to allow correction of colour effects. The wavelength selective absorption effect of the water will also be corrected with the measured distance of the multispectral imaging unit and the actual measured point. The surface roughness and inclination will also effect the actual measured intensity of a point, which can be corrected only to a certain degree, thus detected points with high inclination (higher than ca. 15–20°) will be omitted from post processing and offline interpretation. To have the best possible identification of the minerals, a database will be built, starting with the most common minerals from the test sites of the UX-1. This database will be populated with information acquired by the same multispectral imaging unit to minimize the instrumental differences of the spectra. The software control, data storage and post processing of the data is under development with Research Computing International Ltd in the UNEXMIN project. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 690008.

Motivation Mine digitization is a consequent approach to establish industry 4.0 / IoT related mine operation models based on various dimensions: flexibility, coverage, real-time capability and analytics. Networking technology, wired and wireless, can be easily deployed large scale. Miniaturized sensors, thus can be placed anywhere. Laser technology has been successfully used for more than a decade in the manufacturing industry. However, due to restrictions found in challenging heavy industry environments, such as dust, fog, rain or snow, laser technology can only rarely be found in mining applications. At the same time, technology-supported geometrical environmental scanning is essential for the control of mining machines. GPS in open pit mining is the state of the art technology for machine allocation and dispatch, whereby an underground equivalent is still missing. Because of this technology gap, many machines are frequently operated beyond their original design boundaries, and not according to the production planning which may result in significant safety impacts and collisions. Recent breakthroughs in radar technology both in 2D/3D passive scanning as well as /3D Active localization is bound to trigger a revolution in mining. In close collaboration with major universities, radar technology has been developed to mature and ruggedized industrial sensors by indurad. The public funded project “UPNS4D+” which stands for “Underground 4D+ Positioning, Navigation and Mapping System“, funded by BMBF (FKZ: 033R126), focuses on fully autonomous operated vehicles, including navigation, orientation, collision avoidance by driving autonomously around obstacles whether detected with the radar-tag system or by environmental Radar-scan. Asset and Personnel Localization Radar-tags are suitable to detect any tagged object or person. Vehicle based Radar-radios are used to measure distances and angles to radar-tags, relative to the vehicle. Any other machinery, person helmets, equipment can be tagged and thus can be localized. Based on this information, collision avoidance systems can be realized, by informing the vehicles operator or as break assistance system. Next to important localizations “geotags”, e.g. at crushers, the system can be used to exactly position vehicles, like LHDs to perfectly dump the moved material. Virtual fences can be realized to stop machinery if anyone enters a secured area. This enables fast operation e.g. at drill rigs, where manual work is required, when drill pipes have to be added. In room and pillar environments road crossings can be secured, by detecting exactly the own position at the crossing and observation other vehicles. Environmental Face and Rib Mapping Radar-scan Mapping is further, very advanced radar based technology to measure 2D planes or even the complete 3D environment around vehicles. As well infrastructure based usage might be considered, e.g. at crossings or crushers. Autonomous mapping radar scans algorithms are developed to reconstruct the surrounding and to detect the own driven trajectory including 3D translation, rotation.