Shearer positioning for mining fleet cooperative movement in GPS-denied environments

GPS is unavailable for mobile target tracking due to satellite signal outage in underground mines. Thanks to certain reliable sensor measurements, such as SINS and WSN approaches, the position for mobile target can be estimated in GPS-denied environments. After researching the cooperative movement of mining fleet, the kinematics model and parameter constraints are derived. Then, we outline the details of the cooperative correction strategy implementation about SINS accumulative error and WSN instable position accuracy as simple as possible. The SINS/WSN system is developed by C# language combined with Matlab and SQL software. The results show that the proposed SINS/WSN positioning algorithm can get the reliable position, which can provide the reference for shearer tracking and path planning, and lay the basis for collaborative automation of mining fleet in GPS-denied environments.