Role of Drones in Mine Site Monitoring
SimActive organized a webinar on ‘Mining Site Monitoring Using Drones’, where a discussion was held on how drones and imagery play an essential role in mining site monitoring.
Australia’s longest continually operated uranium mine, known as The Ranger Uranium. For four decades, it provided a reliable and safe supply of uranium ore concentrate (U3O8, or UOC) to the global energy market. In January 2021, the mine has been closed temporarily, because the site needed time to rehabilitate. The mining operator Energy Resources of Australia (ERA) has been ordered to carry out the process of removal of nuclear-safeguarded material from the mine site and return it to its previous condition as it was before the mining started.
Tim Whiteside, Senior Research Scientist at the Government of Australia Department of Climate Change, Energy the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) and his team of scientists are monitoring the remediation of the mine using various tools and techniques.
In the webinar, Eric Andelin CP, Senior Workflow Specialist at SimActive, and Tim Whiteside discussed how drones and other emerging techniques are useful to collect imagery not only of the mine but multiple sites within the park boundary to ensure the clean-up is going according to plan and not adversely affecting the environment within the surrounding park boundary.
There is a lot of data is collected by drones, and to convert it into meaningful information, Correlator3D tool is used. Correlator3D is a high-end mapping software, for the rapid processing of imagery from drones, aircraft, and satellites. It also helps to produce base maps products with using AI/Deep Learning Techniques:
- YOLO (You Only Look Once) models for plant detection and species classification
- Growth dynamics over time (plant size, mortality rate, and species composition)
- Correlate these metrics with manual observations for plant health
- Roll out as a monitoring tool over larger areas
The software acts as aerial triangulation (AT) and produces dense digital surface models (DSM), digital terrain models (DTM), orthomosaics, point clouds, vectorized 3D features, and 3D models.
