Robotic Mining Arrives

Leif Bloomquist writes: "I've been involved in something called the Mining Automation Program, a 5 year R&D effort to create tele-operated and autonomous mining machines. The program just wrapped up, and the world's first totally robotic mine is now in operation in Sudbury, Canada. It's very cool stuff, and yes, in a way, it's a precursor to the robots in "Descent". :) We had to bring together space+robotics technology, wireless LANs, and even virtual reality and video game interfaces. The whole point is to enhance safety by having no humans underground, and to boost productivity by saving the time to travel underground and have one driver controlling a whole fleet."

Comments

But..

[drift factor]

Did they also make a robotic canary to let the other robots know when to get the hell out?

Mark Tilden's Robots

[gimple]

I have this dream (dream 'cause I know I'll never get around to it) of having about a thousand little bug like robots that get their energy from grass. They would spend the day under the porch and come out at night to take little snips off the lawn. The lawn would maintain a constant 3" length. BTW, they would come out at night so they don't scare the snot out of the neighbors.

Sounds pretty cool

[Fatal0E]

Maybe this means that the average price in mined commodities will go down. Of course the pessimist in me says that the corps will just pocket whatever savings are realized through these methods.

What I'd really like to know is if any of the advancements they made to make the project work will be given back to the space and robotics community they tapped.
"Me Ted"

Re:Sounds pretty cool

[cybermage]

Once more, properly formatted:

Why would they do that when they can cut prices, mantain profit margins while boosting sales and productivity.

Most mined materials are commodities and are traded as such. What is important to mining companies is their price per unit. The demand for what they produce is not very elastic.

If they produce twice as much, they may only be able to sell it for half as much, because flooding the market is bad.

Take for example, food. If a unit of food was half its current price, would you buy twice as much? Obviously not. (This, by the way, is why the government pays subsidies to farmers to not grow food)

If you produce too much of something you create a glut and render it worthless.

They may be able to mine things cheaper, but you can bet that they won't mine significantly more.

If savings are to be had from these, it'll be from reducing the steps that need to be taken to make it safe for humans to be in a mine. Prices may come down a bit, but the savings, if there are any, will go into salaries, acquistions, and to shareholders.

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This would be great in Space!

[Smitty825]

If these robots work like the author says, hopefully we will be able to start putting these things onto Asteroids and begin mining the materials from there. Basically, unlimited access to minerals!

Human perception...

[smoondog]

I wonder if even though safety is infinitely improved, there might be a great chance for costly accidents now. For example a person could immediately pick up on cracks in the wall, water dripping, noises, etc that might be a sign of instability. A camera mounted on a robot might not allow the operator to notice. I wonder how they deal with the little things that humans do well automatically like this.

-Moondog

Re:Still not mobile autonomy

[psychosis]

This reminds me a lot about the JASON Project that Dr. Robert Ballard heads up. He's the guy who's team found the Titanic, Lusitania, Edmund Fitzgerald, and a slew of other underwater stuff.
The control panels for JASON look very similar to the ones for the mining 'bots.

my shoe box

[Brigadier]

Here here to the technologists, I do want to add another perspective to this article. I grew up around mines all my life, in Jamaica there are very large alumina mines that spend all there time and efforts tearing up the soil to mine alumina ore which is just below the surface of top soil. here is the problem after mining this wonderful ore the top soil is then replaced and grass is planted back .. where once stood 100 year old trees and rain forest (not really but sort of) these plants hired local drivers and operators to move this dirt around and manage the plants. the mining process alone involves incubating ore with sodium hydroxide which is then then poored of into huge mud lakes, just mare miles from public schools. with no attemped what so ever to clean this up. so forgive me for not supporting or getting all google eyed over automated minds since for me it is just another way for these huge company to tear up more third world countries, not to mention relinquish any jobs that would have been available for the local people. plants spend so much time and money investing in new mining techniques but little and none is spent reclaiming the land, lives, and communities that they distroy. !!!!

yea I'm pissed

How Dare They!

[Seinfeld]

What? You mean someone has the gall to want to keep people from performing one of the most hazardous, unpleasant, life-shortening jobs ever dreamed up? Doesn't everyone have the right to not have some machine take their backbreaking, coal-dust-breathing job? I bet next those monsters will try to take away elephant-dung shoveling! I mean, didn't we learn anything from the tragedy of the Pony Express?
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Re:Bad thing -- Mining Accidents

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the thousands of miners killed or maimed every year because their cheap arsed bosses can't be bothered spending money on safety.

Noone can sensibly oppose the introduction of technologies that remove from human beings the requirement to perform dangerous labour.

Certainly, you'd hope that laid off miners would get retraining etc. and in western countries that *might* happen depending on what unions managed to get out of the bosses.

Either way though, it's doubtful that there would be widespread use anytime soon. Even the car industry, one of the most automated manufacturing processes there are, make extensive use of human labour. It's just hidden away in the subcontracting firms that produce the components that make up a car. It's only really final manufacture that uses robots.

There has been massive automation of all sorts of processes over the last 50 years and yet millions more people are gainfully employed than were back then. By your logic we'd all still be producing wool in our back yards.

Re:Bad thing

[Alien54]

Hello? Is anyone listening? This is like something out of some scary science fiction movie. I can't see how it's good to remove the humanity from mining - or from anything for that matter. It might be miners now, but the next thing it will be your job - cleaners, etc. will all be redundant. We need these jobs. Otherwise what will people do - there are a lot of people out there who aren't intelligent enough to be computer programmers or whatever, so then what? Next thing we'll probably have to introduce eugenics to create the perfect breed of people to remove this. Either that, or due to the high levels of unemployment crime will rise. That is why crime has risen in the last 30 years - young, stupid men can no longer find employment, and so they are alienated from society. The problem's bad enough now, but just think what it will be like in the future.

We need to create our own future where human creativity is encouraged and enhanced. Where education gives people the tools to live in a changing world.

If this is not done, then you probably have the right to run in fear from technology. Run to the hills, and be the last free man on earth, hiding in terror in the caves

Or you can help make and create the world that avoids the terrors that you see.

If you do not take control of your future, then your future will be out of your control. Help create a future that is better then the one you see.

Now, miniaturize them

[DeadVulcan]

A week or so ago, I saw a program on TV about diamond mining, and how the use of very large machinery has eliminated the possibility of finding very large diamonds any more, because the rock is crushed before being brought to the surface.

But, if the mining robots were smaller in scale and used smaller digging instruments, larger diamonds (like on the order of tennis ball size), rare as they may be, could have a chance of being recovered whole.

It's also probable that smaller robots would be able to recover materials much more efficiently and in a much more environmentally friendly way.

I doubt the economies of scale of current technology will support thousands of tiny robots, or if such robots would be capable of digging through solid rock.

But it's cool to speculate.

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If it is dangerous job...

[plopez]

then by all means let's not have a human being doing it! I grew up in a mining community in the western U.S. (and have long since left) but I still keep in touch and every once in a while a miner will fall into a crusher, get run over by heavy equipment, get sucked into a conveyor belt etc. Things are much better than they were 50 years ago in terms of safety (thanks to MSHA, OSHA and the unions) but accidents still happen.

If robots make things safer, then more power to them! I personally cannot justify human beings risking their lives for profits when alteratives exist.

Where I grew up people know that mechanization is increasing (the mines hire far fewer people than in the past), and so there is a real push for people to either go into the skilled trades or college.

Times change and people must adapt....

Re:read first, think second, react last

[Dyolf Knip]

For everyone of us who can afford to survive in the 'new economy', there are dozens and dozens just barely scraping by.

I suppose you'd rather go back to everyone being sustenance farmers living one bad harvest away from starvation? There's a very good reason why a mere 3% of the US population can easily produce enough food for the rest of us. I'll give you a hint; it's that T-word that you seem to abhor so much.

I'm sick of technology. I wish it would go away, sometimes.

You want technology to go away? Fine. Go live in a cave in the middle of fscking nowhere so you needn't be bothered by such evils like running water. Demand that everyone with you have an average lifespan of 30 to 40 years, since modern medicine is anathema. Any children born to your family can have a survival rate on par with the toss of a coin. Have fun eeking out a living, hunter-gatherer style.

But do not even think to tell me that I have to join you.

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leaky-feeder comunications systems

[Tekmage]

If you're curious about how they actually get the bandwidth down into the mines, check out this company I did some design work for a few years back:

El-Equip Inc.

The Big Nickle

[thex23]

I remember Sudbury fondly. The Big Nickle. I spent a couple of years there as a kid (like 5 or 6 years old). A few interesting things:

• Sudbury is in a giant impact crater: everything is rock
• they recently built an observatory down one of the old mines looking for evidence of neutrino interactions and proton decay
• The surrounding terrain is so bleak they used to bring Apollo astronauts there to train (that's the Canadian Shield for ya)
• every night, a little train would dump molten slag on a heap. I could see it frommy house, and it was really beautiful watching it spill down the slope in reds and oranges, with little flames here and there
• Sudbury had (has?) a giant smokestack that was designed to put the crap so high up that nobody around the city would complain... just everyone else downwind
• I went on a tour of an Inco mine, and got really creeped out by the "miner" mannequins and low ceilings.
• I broke my leg when I hit a rock while sledding at my friend Neil's place on Kingcora Court. I had to drag myself across the street because my babysitter wouldn't carry a screaming 6 year old. Later that year, I filled my mom's AMC Gremlin's gas tank with water (I had a hose in my hand and asked her if she wanted a "fill up"... She said sure. I guess she wasn't paying attention.)
• Subdury had a lot of beavers, and there was a controversy around dynamiting their dams back in the day
• there are only two careers of interest in Sudbury (according to the movie Road Kill): hockey player or mass murderer.

We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.

Amazing possibilities

[jabber01]

The obvious response to this is 'how do we get it back to Earth?', and while this is a valid question, it's extremely near-sighted.

Earth has adequate resources for terrestrial needs. (See where I'm going?) But, if we were to ever build anything in space, or on the moon, then we would have to carry materials to the construction site. (Now you see where I'm going.)

Mining asteroids would make plentiful raw materials available more cheaply. Have you priced the cost of lifting a pound of aluminium into orbit? With the realistic prospect of asteroid mining, all we would have to do is launch and assemble a refining/manufacturing plant into space.

Once there, if cleverly managed, it could be used to make whatever we need. It's the old 'teach a man to fish' approach. Once we can process raw materials in space, the cost of lifting a refinery there would be recovered very quickly.

An orbiting (or travelling) refinery could make all sorts of interesting alloys that we can not make on Earth. It could make replacement parts as necessary, or build new pieces not thought of at the beginning of a mission. It could even make better use of physics to shape parts in new ways (rotation, acceleration). Such 'natural' shapes, created under gravitationally controlled conditions, just might prove to have very desirable properties.

A space-bourne refinery could be nuclear-powered without the risks of killing people or polluting the environment. It could use focused sunlight to weld parts together. Several small plants might be assembled together to make very large assemblies that we could never hoist into space (Spacedock?) from the Earth.

Gutted asteroids might become the fuselages of future spaceships, with the engines and such structures built from the materials dug out of that asteroid.

Ultimately, the point is that anything, anything at all, that gets us out there, is a Good Thing. If robotic mining and the greed for asteroid-dug diamonds is what prompts the first step, so be it.

The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

That Demon, Technology

[Dannon]

I'm sick of technology. I wish it would go away, sometimes. I really do.

I've been reading a very good book recently, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, by Samuel Florman... and he addresses the growing trend of antitechnology, and refutes many claims associated with this trend. I'd have to quote three full chapters just to sum up his arguements, but I wouldn't hesitate to put it on my list of 'recommended reading'.

The thing is, technology is not likely to 'go away'. To begin with, it's a gross personification to treat technology as a thing with a will of its own. It can seem that way, to be sure... but every unforseen result of technology can be traced to a human-made decision, or series of decisions.

I belive it is an aspect of human nature to experiment, to explore, and to create. In a way, Philosophy, Art, Science, and Engineering are all efforts to fulfill a fundamental human impulse. I am attending school to become an Engineer... but at the same time, I consider myself a part-time Philosopher, Artist, and Scientist.

The 'solution' proposed by most antitechnologists does involve deliberately changing human nature. But such proposals are dangerous. How do we know that we are not 'dehumanizing' ourselves even further?

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