Review of Automated Operations in Drilling and Mining

Current advances and trends in the fields of mechanical, material, and software engineering have allowed mining technology to undergo a significant transformation. Aiming to maximize the efficiency and safety of the mining process, several enabling technologies, such as the recent advances in artificial intelligence, IoT, sensor fusion, computational modeling, and advanced robotics, are being progressively adopted in mining machine manufacturing while replacing conventional parts and approaches that used to be the norm in the rock ore extraction industry. This article aims to provide an overview of research trends and state-of-the-art technologies in face exploration and drilling operations in order to define the vision toward the realization of fully autonomous mining exploration machines of the future, capable of operating without any external infrastructure. As the trend of mining at large depths is increasing and as the re-opening of abandoned mines is gaining more interest, near-to-face mining exploration approaches for identifying new ore bodies need to undergo significant revision. This article aims to contribute to future developments in the use of fully autonomous and cooperative smaller mining exploration machines.