Using a case study fatality to depict the limits of proximity detection systems for articulating, underground machinery

• Line of sight provided by camera system in a case study of a mining fatality is explored.
• Line of sight provided by four cameras would not be sufficient to see the victim prior to collision.
• Interaction of mine design and large equipment impacts available visibility for the operator.
• Research should quantify the impact of machine articulation on camera line of sight.

Proximity detection systems are actively being marketed to the underground mining section as a way to provide enhanced information for operators of large underground machinery. To date, many of the systems are lacking the reliability and validity ratings that researchers would like to see them have. Due to this, they may not interact in a predictable way to always improve operator awareness. In fact, Burgess-Limerick (2011) noted that in many fatalities that occurred on underground machinery, the operator was aware of the location of the victim, or they were the victim themselves. This work recreates one of the accidents from that review in a computer simulation environment, models a video-based proximity detection system and then evaluates the capacity of the system to improve operator line of sight. Results demonstrate that there was only a small window of time during which the operator may have been able to see the victim’s location even with a hypothetical camera system installed. The work points to the importance that mine design and machine design have with respect to improving safety of the worker, as well as the downfalls of existing proximity detection systems that rely on video feeds mounted to the machinery.