FATIGUE MONITORING & COLLISION AVOIDANCE
Paul Moore spoke to Brad Dalton, Business Development Manager at SITECH (WA), who
was the developer and architect of its innovative SiTRACK collision avoidance solution,
based on Trimble GNSS technology
Q Collision avoidance is more commonly known
for mobile truck fleets, was there a request from
customers for CAS on dozers and fixed
installations such as conveyors and reclaimers?
Yes, in the case of SiTRACK it was developed for
Roy Hill specifically on the basis of a need to
prevent collisions between two Cat D11T dozers
and the overhead conveyor. Both dozers were
equipped with our project partner RCT’s
ControlMaster ® Teleremote solution which
removed the operator from the machine and
relocated them to an operator station, equipped
with vision package from the area; allowing
them to control all machine functions from an
ergonomic, safe environment. Both the conveyors
and dozers are tracked using high precision
Trimble GNSS equipment that allow us to model
the movement of all assets in near real time and in
absolute space. The result of this is that by
tracking the assets quickly and accurately its very
easy, computer wise, to calculate critical distances
on the fly thus providing near real time alerts for
the moving and stationary equipment. Our system
is entirely capable of tracking dozens of moving
vehicles and a similar number of fixed assets in
both the horizontal and vertical dimensions;
typical accuracies are around ±50 mm for XYZ
position and heading and roughly one second for
reaction time to full stop from red (about to collide
with a critical geofence boundary) alert.
every person in the mine working in safety-
critical jobs could be monitored for dangerous
levels of tiredness.”
GE rolls out CAS at Lihir
Moving on to Collision Avoidance Systems (CAS),
GE is working with Newcrest’s Lihir gold mine.
“Mining fleet interactions, whether that’s
vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-personnel are
definitely one of the highest safety risks for us,”
says Tony Sprague, Group Manager of Mining
Technology for Newcrest Mining Ltd. “We have
many vehicles in operation and with heavy
vehicles , ancillary vehicles and light vehicles
operating together, it doesn’t take much to have
a critical event or a significant potential incident
(SPI).”
“On all our sites we’ve continued to have these
significant potential incident events, year on year,
and we decided we want to be proactive and use
technology to help us help ourselves,” says
Sprague. “Every individual is important to us,” he
emphasises, referring to Newcrest’s safety ethos
which works towards “zero injury” and promotes
44 International Mining | JANUARY 2018
Q With dozers had the OEMs not focussed on
collision avoidance as they didn’t see that niche
as top priority?
The dozer OEMs have a solution but it is a very
complex and costly solution using multiple
sensors and highly complex statistical path
analysis to predict future performance (albeit it
is done very quickly and for relatively small
distances in front of a moving asset). Ours is
significantly less so and doesn’t rely on crystal
ball predictions which is typical of most OEM
collision avoidance solutions
Q With SiTRACK is the focus just as much on
asset protection as it is on operator safety? Is
any laser or radar technology used?
Absolutely. Operating a moving vehicle where
the focus has to be on the blade means that the
operators’ ability to predict where the drop off
above and below the dozer then the computer
can take action well before the operator can. We
don’t use lasers or radar as they only cause
issues when it gets foggy or there are
occlusions like dirt piles in the way. On a
stockpile as opposed to the relatively flat
ground that you would find across much of the
mine, one big dozer is fairly easy to hide from
another really big dozer with one bigger pile of
ore. This means that by the time radar or LiDAR
have worked out what’s nearby the two dozers
have already run into each other. Mobile fleets
are for the most part working on a dinner plate
while we cover a globe, you could say there is as
much difference between them as Galileo and
the Church in the 1600s!
Q How has SiTRACK been received in the market
can you provide a case story or any customer
comments?
for the batter top is of a draw down vault whilst
still being aware of a moving stacker conveyor
boom (that weighs as much as the dozer and is
moving just as fast) is always going to be a
risky exercise. SiTRACK allows the operator to
first be removed from the vehicle and second
have someone (our system) looking after
his/her back. Practically this means that if the
system detects a possible collision in any one of
its 10 monitored zones that it is active around, Reception has been outstanding with requests
from all over the globe to provide info and
the belief that “all injuries are preventable”.
In the first rollout of advanced safety
technology on a Papua New Guinean mine site,
Australian-developed GE CAS equipment started
arriving at Lihir in October 2017. The GPS-based,
camera-enabled and detection-proximity system
selected by Newcrest will tag all personnel active
in the mine’s production area and alert them and
the operators of heavy mobile equipment with
two-way alarms when they’re in dangerous
proximity to one another. Around 1,500
employees and contractors across all shifts at
Lihir will be protected.
The GE CAS system has been developed over
almost two decades by engineers in New South
Wales, Australia. Among its features: it ensures
high integrity by deploying multiple proximity-
detection technologies including GPS, cameras
and radio frequency according to site
requirements; it is self-testing, automatically
reporting in real time any failure within the
system; it is equipment agnostic, meaning it can
be applied to any make of mining equipment;
and it provides sophisticated monitoring and back-to-base reporting which, in addition to
facilitating safer mining operations, may be
analysed for productivity gains and improved
maintenance.
“At the moment it’s an operational-awareness
system,” says Sprague, referring to the fact that
the Lihir system will flag with both the operators
of vehicles and with people on foot, that they are
in potentially dangerous proximity to each other.
On driver-operated heavy equipment, a proximity
alarm will immediately activate a camera
covering the area of proximity, and give that view
on a touchscreen in the cab, so that the driver
can clearly see and respond to the risk. Each
heavy vehicle will have cameras positioned to
give operators 360 degree vision of their
surroundings as needed.
One of the reasons Newcrest chose GE’s Digital
Mine technology is that “it’s not far away that the
system will provide real collision-avoidance
capabilities where the vehicle itself will respond
in certain situations,” says Sprague. Evasive
action might then include system takeover of the
vehicle, applying the brakes and potentially
quotes, the system has only been live since this
time last year so the number of clients at this
point is low but the potential is huge. Here is
the reaction from one company who we are
dealing with and the way they see our system:
“Brad I have to say I think it is the most
excellent collision protection system I have seen
so far in over 30 years in this business…”