Future of Mining

Today the mining industry is rapidly digitizing and automating all aspects of planning, operations, maintenance and safety. A fully autonomous mine with humans only playing a supporting role (e.g. for maintenance) is closer than you think. These fully autonomous modern mines will be digitally connected, and decision making will largely be run by algorithms — with a manual over-ride (machines will never be able to get the ‘gut-instincts’ that miners have).

The mine of the future will be monitored from anywhere by technologically driven workforces. And these mines of the future will be safer, more productive, sustainable, environment-friendly.

In this eBook, we cover the core technologies that are driving the roadmap to such fully autonomous mines. Technologies such as Drones, LiDAR scanners, Autonomous Vehicles, real-time image and video processing algorithms, AI and ML based categorization and decision support systems, Digital Twins, are already mainstream – but still have not been fully applied to Mining use cases.

That said, Digitization, and then Automation, does not happen overnight. The best time to to start on the Digitization and Automation roadmap is now (if you have not already done so). And while it needs to be supported by corporate, it should really be led by the mines itself — because the mines are closest to the problems and can try out these technologies first hand to ensure that the technologies indeed solve the use cases they are supposed to solve. 

Also know that not all technologies live up to their hype. One of the biggest failures of technology (as of this writing at least) is in Predictive Maintenance of Mining Equipment — we understand that this is a controversial topic. However, there is enough evidence that it has Predictive Maintenance has not yielded the ROI it was expected to simply because it does not work. For example, the most common down reasons for a Bolter is likely to be a broken hose — and there are no sensors monitoring and/or model performance there. And, each manufacturer’s specs (OEM or otherwise) are so different from each other that you cannot build a high confidence Predictive Maintenance model. 

That said, there are so many other technologies that have proven to solve specific mining use cases. One brilliant innovation we’ve seen a few geologists use is the LiDAR scanner on their iPhones to do face mapping and ore control. 

In this e-Book, we have covered how these technologies specifically address mining use cases. Most of the content in this e-Book has been used in presentations made at The Colorado School of Mines in Denver, Indian Institute of Technology in Dhanbad (Indian School of Mines), Montana Tech, Curtin University and many others. The future of mining is closer than you think. More than 70% of the mines we work with are already on an accelerated path to digitize and automate their mines. 

Let us know if you’d like us to give you and your team a presentation — for FREE of course — on Digitization and Automation trends in the Industry.