Continuous Monitoring and Improvement of the Blasting Process in Open Pit Mines Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Techniques
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current techniques used for monitoring the blasting process in open pit mines are manual, intermittent and inefficient and can expose technical manpower to hazardous conditions. This study presents the application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems for monitoring and improving the blasting process in open pit mines. Field experiments were conducted in different open pit mines to assess rock fragmentation, blast-induced damage on final pit walls, blast dynamics and the accuracy of blastholes including production and pre-split holes. The UAV-based monitoring was done in three different stages, including pre-blasting, blasting and post-blasting. In the pre-blasting stage, pit walls were mapped to collect structural data to predict in situ block size distribution and to develop as-built pit wall digital elevation models (DEM) to assess blast-induced damage. This was followed by mapping the production blasthole patterns implemented in the mine to investigate drillhole alignment. To monitor the blasting process, a high-speed camera was mounted on the UAV to investigate blast initiation, sequencing, misfired holes and stemming ejection. In the post-blast stage, the blasted rock pile (muck pile) was monitored to estimate fragmentation and assess muck pile configuration, heave and throw. The collected aerial data provide detailed information and high spatial and temporal resolution on the quality of the blasting process and significant opportunities for process improvement. The current challenges with regards to the application of UAVs for blasting process monitoring are discussed, and recommendations for obtaining the most value out of an UAV application are provided.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".