TECH & AI
Mechanised subterranean coal mine operations are complex and dangerous , and require an abundance of people to work on-site . Safer – and more efficient – mining with few or no personnel working underground is one of the main goals of intelligent mining .
Tunnelling is the most difficult and dangerous of all coal mine operations accounting for more than 40 % of all accidents . Underground operational safety relies on manual supervision , which is inefficient ; more than half of tunnelling accidents are caused by human error .
Little wonder , then , that the coal mining industry is looking to deploy remotely controlled mining . Yet until recently efforts here have been hampered by technical and physical challenges .
Optical fibres are prone to damage at the face Video-image feedback across fully mechanised mining faces needs hundreds of cameras to be ranged across a coal face that might stretch for as far as half a kilometre . But with mechanised mining being such an unforgiving environment , the optical fibres used in traditional wired solutions are prone to damage , which causes a lot of faults .
Wireless solutions , meanwhile , require high uplink bandwidth and low latency for remote-control signals , and those above ground can view only separate images , meaning there is no single clear view of the entire mine face .
But now , thanks to 5G , networks can offer ultra high-bandwidth , and alos feature uplink-downlink technology that supports real-time wireless HD video imagery consisting of hundreds of channels .
102 June 2024