Towards a Fleet of Autonomous Haul-Dump Vehicles in Hybrid Mines

Alexander Ferrein, Michael Reke, Ingrid Scholl, Benjamin Decker, Nicolas Limpert, Gjorgji Nikolovski, Stefan Schiffer

2023

Abstract

Like many industries, the mining industry is facing major transformations towards more sustainable and decarbonised operations with smaller environmental footprints. Even though the mining industry, in general, is quite conservative, key drivers for future developments are digitalisation and automation. Another direction forward is to mine deeper and reduce the mine footprint at the surface. This leads to so-called hybrid mines, where part of the operation is open pit, and part of the mining takes place underground. In this paper, we present our approach to running a fleet of autonomous hauling vehicles suitable for hybrid mining operations. We present a ROS 2-based architecture for running the vehicles. The fleet of currently three vehicles is controlled by a SHOP3-based planner which dispatches missions to the vehicles. The basic actions of the vehicles are realised as behaviour trees in ROS 2. We used a deep learning network for detection and classification of mining objects trained with a mixing of synthetic and real world training images. In a life-long mapping approach, we define lanelets and show their integration into HD maps. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of the vehicles in operation in simulation and in real-world experiments in a gravel pit.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ferrein A., Reke M., Scholl I., Decker B., Limpert N., Nikolovski G. and Schiffer S. (2023). Towards a Fleet of Autonomous Haul-Dump Vehicles in Hybrid Mines. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-623-1, pages 278-288. DOI: 10.5220/0011693600003393

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart23,
author={Alexander Ferrein and Michael Reke and Ingrid Scholl and Benjamin Decker and Nicolas Limpert and Gjorgji Nikolovski and Stefan Schiffer},
title={Towards a Fleet of Autonomous Haul-Dump Vehicles in Hybrid Mines},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2023},
pages={278-288},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011693600003393},
isbn={978-989-758-623-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - Towards a Fleet of Autonomous Haul-Dump Vehicles in Hybrid Mines
SN - 978-989-758-623-1
AU - Ferrein A.
AU - Reke M.
AU - Scholl I.
AU - Decker B.
AU - Limpert N.
AU - Nikolovski G.
AU - Schiffer S.
PY - 2023
SP - 278
EP - 288
DO - 10.5220/0011693600003393