Towards Collision Awareness System Based on LoRa Ranging for the Mining Industry

In this paper, Collision Awareness Systems (CAS) are discussed as an alternative to improve security in mines. As this economic activity is crucial for some coun-tries but very insecure, many control measures have been implemented globally. Among them, Pedestrian CAS aim to prevent collisions of vehicles with pedestrians. This sys-tems are mostly developed with a wireless communication technology given to each party (vehicles and pedestrians) so they can share its location and alert the vehicle when the distance between both is dangerous. For this purpose, LoRa modulation was used as it posses long range detection, low energy consumption, high scalability and potentially low latency. In addition, some LoRa transmitters allow to use the technique Time of Flight (ToF) Ranging. With this technique, the distance between two nodes can be measured without the use of any additional modules. We developed a master and slave nodes to validate the effectiveness of this methods focusing on evaluating statically and dynamically the use of ToF Ranging. The tests carried out gave results in terms of latency, signal strength, distance precision and packet delivery ratio and were tested by varying the parameters in open-pit an underground scenarios.