FATIGUE AND COLLISION AVOIDANCE
Hitachi’ s Aerial Angle ® technology enhances the visibility for operators of mining equipment by alerting them to obstacles when driving, stopping or starting their dump trucks
Peace of mind
Predicting and where possible eliminating fatigue in mining operations; as well as introducing new collision avoidance and object detection systems, remain top priorities for today’ s safety conscious mining industry, reports Paul Moore
Equipment-related accidents throughout the history of the mining industry have driven an ever-increasing focus on operator safety. Today, as regulatory agencies and mine organisations continue to strive for a zero-incident workplace, mines everywhere are placing even more emphasis on both standalone and fleet management system( FMS)-integrated safety solutions. So while mines are evaluating the many various collision awareness technologies available to the market today, each having their own strengths and weaknesses, how do mine managers know which is best?
Modular Mining Systems Global Sales Manager, Ed Bardo, told IM:“ Vehicle-to-vehicle collisions are among the top five causes of highrisk incidents in mines, resulting in equipment downtime, productivity losses, equipment- and personnel-related costs, injuries, and fatalities. These factors have generated a global motivation to focus on vehicle safety within mines, including increased regulation and legislation that will soon require mining organisations to have and use a safety system that can detect and minimise vehicle collisions.”
He adds on regional drivers:“ In South Africa, for example, legislation states that any open-pit mine in which a collision risk is significant must include a means for any‘ diesel-powered trackless mobile machine’ to automatically detect the presence of any other such machine within its vicinity, and upon detecting the presence of another machine, the operators in both vehicles shall be alerted to each other’ s presence by means of an effective warning, such as an audible and / or visual cue. Australia does not yet have legislation in place, but New South Wales has pre-specified basic capabilities that will have to be adhered to when their legislation is enacted in order to meet specific safety requirements. For example, a mine that requires Proximity Awareness Technology will be required to utilise a system that alerts the operator to a potential collision; this alert could include an audible alarm, a visual cue, or both.”
Bardo says that the common weakness that
the existing proximity and collision awareness approaches on the market today have is the inability to filter out events that are not actually a potential vehicle collision risk.“ Modular Mining Systems’ approach to collision awareness focuses on minimising false alarms while providing real time information about high-risk potential incidents. Modular’ s MineAlert™ Collision Awareness System( CAS) utilises intelligent path prediction and scenariobased pattern recognition algorithms to filter out the potential non-risk based nuisance and proximity alarms, which can dramatically reduce the false alarm rate. This gives the operators of mining vehicles increased situational awareness by providing critical decision-making safety information only when it matters.”
One of the major challenges for a collision awareness system is the ability to predict the actual direction a driver is going in the near term( one to five seconds out).“ Many systems on the market today use range and proximity sensors that alert operators when two vehicles are approaching each other; as mentioned previously, proximity, speed, and bearing alone will often alarm in normal operating conditions, even though no collision risk is imminent. A common example of this is when two haul trucks on the haul route are passing each other on a curved road going in opposite directions and in different lanes. This appears to be a collision due to the fact that the
58 International Mining | JANUARY 2017