Pit & Quarry, August 2018

DRONES Aerial operations have enabled the team to improve surveyor safety by minimizing the time spent around heavy machinery on active mining sites Luck Stones Eric Warinner prepares to launch the eBee RTK ways to map its terrain while ensuring reliability and maintaining surveyor safety PIoneeRIng UAVs As an early adopter of UAV technology Luck Stone partnered with Airware a data collection processing company to explore potential drone solutions on the market that could optimize efficiencies across its mining sites An aerial technique was determined to be the best approach to calculate accurate and reliable stockpile data while also improving surveyor safety Following recommendations from Airware Luck Stone purchased a fully autonomous senseFly eBee RTK mapping drone Additional features such as its real time kinematic RTK capability and virtual referencing stations option could also provide further data collection benefits to the team To map the stockpiles at each of Luck Stones sites the team first carried out a pre flight assessment using the eBee RTKs built in eMotion 3 flight planning software The team checked the feasibility and safety of the task and planned the route accordingly Flying under the legal limit of 400 ft across sites up to 1000 acres the eBee RTK drone is deployed between one and four times depending on the size of the site and weather conditions Each flight takes on average 30 to 40 minutes Following a flight raw data is submitted to Airwares processing softwarethrough an online platform Between 24 and 48 hours later the team has access to detailed contour patterns and imagery which is shared with each site for identification of stockpiles The data can then be sent to the central financial department at Luck Stone which confirms the stockpile amounts and forms an accurate inventory of all materials InTegRATed InsIghTs The benefits of using a UAV solution to map stockpiles allows Luck Stone to carry out more inventories than its previous method of using a manned aircraft The speed and flexibility of the flight process coupled with the fast turnaround of data enables the team to perform quarterly inventories a significant improvement from previous years when they were limited to twice a year due to cost and time constraints Each individual site can now be assessed in a maximum of two and a half weeks with the team having achieved this within one week to meet a particularly short deadline The fast processing of data has also improved operational efficiencies as it allows the team to continue to fly the drone between different projects relying on a continuous stream of data from Airware instead of the previous two week lead time to receive data Despite the reduced administrative burden following each flight the number of employees required to carry out the process remains the same One person is still needed on site with another two supporting with data collection in the office The depth of detail that we have been able to achieve using UAVs has really set our results apart from previous years says John Blackmore survey and mapping supervisor at Luck Stone We have received a better resolution of data and benefited from greater flexibility and overall accuracy with a drone For instance using a manned aircraft could previously achieve a ground spatial distance of 1 ft resolution whereas now it is fewer than 6 in Also Luck Stone can now have at least four datapoints per year compared to the previous two 52 PIT QUARRY August 2018 pitandquarry com