Digitising mining features

Mining is an inherently dangerous and costly process, so BHP is always looking for ways to maintain safety while increasing operational efficiency. BHP implemented semi-autonomous drill rigs in order to reduce the need for people on the active mining surface, however this left them with a problem - validating the location of the drilled holes. The drill rigs have GPS sensors and drill according to a plan. After drilling, drones capture images of the site to verify the drilled locations. Validating drill patterns and detecting drift in the GPS sensors was a manual process that analysed only 2% of the holes in a pattern, could take hours to complete. This manual process could only detect GPS drift once it had become a significant issue, requiring drill rigs to be taken out of operation for inspection and maintenance - a costly procedure.

CIDS worked with BHP, with funding from the Resources Technology and Critical Minerals Trailblazer, to design a phased automation strategy. The first phase used reported drill locations as reference points, then extracted features from cropped aerial imagery to identify drill hole locations, flag unreliable data, and detect calibration issues such as GPS drift.

Validation against manually tagged data showed accuracy within approximately one pixel. In tested cases the workflow frequently verified more than 70% of holes, and sometimes more than 95%. The increased number of holes used for analysis means that it is now possible to identify GPS drift on individual rigs well before it becomes a significant issue. This in turn allows BHP to perform pro-active maintenance on these rigs, reducing out-of-cycle maintenance and increasing their operational efficiency. BHP estimates that avoiding out-of-cycle maintenance will save them $1 Million per year across the 6 Iron Ore sites which they operate in WA.

The second phase of this project focused on delivering a software product that could be integrated into the BHP infrastructure.  By working closely with the minesite operators, CIDS was able to rapidly test and deploy software into the locked down BHP systems. Thanks to this seamless integration, our software tool has now become part of business as usual for BHP WA Iron Ore operations and is now being used to validate drill pattern on every site.