Leveraging Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Mining Industry: Research Opportunities and Challenges

In recent times, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) also known as drone has been extensively used to study the scope of such technology in a range of applications including emergency communication coverage, agriculture, search and rescue, temporary wireless communication coverage, packet delivery, smart city deployments, defense, etc. Acknowledging the features offered by UAVs in different application domains, here we describe a vision for leveraging UAVs with wireless sensor networks to enhance the ability of mining operations and to provide a safe work environment to the miners in both routine and emergency scenarios. The main contributions of this chapter are threefold. First, it critically presents the potential applications of UAVs in mine and their use cases. Second, it provides and discusses the basic wireless networking architecture for such high-stress work environment. Furthermore, different design challenges are also discussed in detail. Third, considering a mine disaster scenario, we propose a UAV based multi-hop emergency communication system. Different performance metrics such as packet error rate, delay, and number of retransmissions per packet have been used to study the proposed emergency communication framework. The proposed system will assist the miners and rescue team members in case of an emergency and improves the quality of experience to the end users.

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