Saskatchewan Polytechnic is working on a way to keep miners safer, underground in the province.

Terry Peckham, Research Chair for the Digital Centre of Excellence, says their project is trying to create wireless underground positioning. The aim is to help keep miners and machinery keep away from each other, by tracking where people and machines are at all times, and to help machinery avoid collisions with mine walls.

Peckham says they have developed a working prototype using existing technology that was used in industrial settings. The research team had to adapt the technology to work underground where it isn’t set to work properly. They faced challenges due to wireless signals bouncing around too much underground and creating ghost images, signals being absorbed by materials or being carried too far. Peckham says these are issues that you wouldn’t find in an industrious setting above ground, or even in an open pit mine.

Peckham states that their prototype has been able to achieve a certain level of accuracy which they now want to improve on over the next few months. The hope will be to actually integrate the positioning system into autonomous machinery in the future.

The project began in 2019 with a half-million-dollars in funding from Nutrien, BHP, the International Mineral Innovation Institute, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.