Introduction

The Acumine technology can be used to improve safety in haul truck operations by assisting the operator. The Safety management and design can also be improved by providing feedback about the operator performance.

By examining the different types of accidents common to haul truck operations, we can develop technology to aid the driver for these modes of accidents. Once developed, these operator aids can be utilised in two ways. Firstly, there is direct real-time feedback to the operator when a safety issue arises (Reactive Approach). Secondly, this information is collected and can be used for external monitoring of the operators performance and can be used to provide feedback, incentives, enforcement of rules and also to enhance training techniques (Proactive Approach).

 

Methodologies for safety management

The next Figure shows the implementation of mine safety / monitoring and design with the actual Acumine technology. The trucks are retrofitted with operator interfaces to provide different levels of warning according to the situation around the truck. The proximity events and alarms are logged by each truck and then downloaded when close to the base station. Further off-line processing is then performed to provide feedback to the managers and to the drivers. This information can also be used to detect dangerous areas in the mine and to provide different rules for different areas. This is what is referred to as “Context Switching”.

 

The system provides reactive information to the truck driver and feedback to the mine manager for post-analysis when the logged data from the truck is downloaded to the base station

Acumine is also researching into intelligent algorithm to automatically detect critical areas in the mine and generate appropriate protocols to interact with the operators.