Mining Automation - Requirements and worldwide Implementations

Over the several past decades attempts have been made to automate and robotize the mining operations. A major technological revolution is to be brought about by developments in mining robotics, remotely operated systems and ultimately controlled by software agents. This will lead to a complete mine-wide automation. The backbone of a fully automated mine would be intelligent machines, computer based real time monitoring, control and communication system. The paper describes the components and the technology to be used in the fully automated mines. The paper overviews the mine automation programmes that are being adapted in several advanced countries of the world including India. It also describes a mine environmental monitoring system already developed at Central Mining Research Institute, Dhanbad, which is being extended to include production data and other necessary data for the efficient mine management