Case Study: Bucket Sensing
Industry
Coal Mining
Region
North America
Location
British Columbia Canada
Application
P&H 4100 electric rope shovel
Customer Profile
Truck and shovel open pit operations with 7 electric rope shovels

Situation
An accurate location of shovel bucket is currently missing in open pit operations to correlation the geo-spatial location with contextual and sensory data such as digability index, payload, ore sorting, coal seams location and orientation. The mine was interested to develop a solution can precisely determine the location of bucket and could be correlated with other on-board and cloud data.Solution
RIGIDprecision™ platform from RIGID ROBOTICS provided scalable real-time data from shovel enabled by RIGIDsense™ hardware which was sent to the cloud and processed an onboard computer where advanced bucket sensing algorithms determined the accurate location of bucket on a real-time basis. The bucket position data were ingested by different pipelines for different applications like drill and blast optimization, and coal seam visualization.Pilot Duration
3 months (October – January)Availability
RIGIDprecision™ platform availability: 99.99% of shovel availabilityBenefits:
- Increase compliance to mine plan
- Improve recovery while reducing dilution or ore loss
- Basis of geo-spatial data analysis for multiple applications: drill and blast optimization, 3D seam visualization, payload, ore sorting, mine plan compliance, etc.
Outcome:
- Bucket position with less than 20 cm accuracy
- Multiple pipelines to different applications such as GIS, Drill and Blast Optimization, Mine Planning and Scheduling Software