Future Challenges of Positioning in Underground Mines

The mining industry is facing a difficult challenge in the coming decades. High grade ore is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain and production in underground mines is constantly being carried out at deeper levels. This increases the production cost for the companies and a technology shift is needed to secure the production.One solution often discussed is to introduce more autonomous machines and robots in the mine. This would improve personnel safety and also increase the productivity. Autonomous machines are already being used in mines, but often in restricted areas and they are typically not deployed on a large scale. Introducing unmanned machines on a large scale requires a completely new positioning solution compared to those being used today. Current solutions are primarily intended for personnel safety and emergency rescue, but these are not intended nor suited to be used for tracking and controlling unmanned vehicles.The state of the art in positioning technologies has generally had a strong focus on consumer industry; this paper will describe a more challenging research topic, the underground mine. It will describe the state of the art in underground mining positioning applications as well as the foreseen future positioning applications. Taking the special mining requirements into account, the challenges of positioning in underground mines are thereafter identified and discussed.The paper concludes that there are many challenges to solve in several areas, and that the research community has an important role to play.