We want our research to help people working in mining.

In our project, we’re planning to help people working in mining have an easier time finding the materials they are interested in. These materials could be metals, minerals, or rocks. It can also be things that affect the safety of their workplace, for example, rocks that react with rainwater and change the environment around them.

We want to help by pointing out areas that need to be looked at more closely to make sure everything is safe and stays safe. No one should need to walk into an area that is not stable when a drone can do that job.

Our research group is made up of different European and Australian companies, research institutes, and geological surveys. We have experience in camera design, drone flight planning, monitoring mine sites by taking samples and analysing them in the laboratory and using satellite data to analyse the surface of the Earth.

We are going to look at areas where mining happens or has happened in the past. Both types of areas will show signs of how mining changed the Earth’s surface and left a mark.

We will look at images from satellites in space and from drones flying around 100 meters above the ground. The cameras that we’re using can see far more than a human or cameras that you can buy in a normal store. We can map the position of different minerals, rock types, or waste materials and show changes in the ground surface chemistry.

We want to use drones because, with them, we can create maps in real time or within minutes. We can fly over the area of interest every day if we want to. Satellites repeat their flight over an area at defined times, sometimes every couple of days or weeks, depending on the satellite. And satellite images often have clouds in them, so we cannot see the ground properly. Drones fly below the cloud cover but the data from them are influenced by clouds as well.

Changes happen very often at an active mine site, sometimes daily. We want to be able to follow that change when it happens. That’s why we’re using drones as well as satellites.

When we use drones, we can fly closer to the ground, and we will see more details. We can also focus on areas that interest us most. The data we collect will contain more detail to analyse and will make our mineral or material map more precise.

To make the maps that we’re making easier to read for miners, we combine them with 3-dimensional models. This way, someone looking at the map can always see where the different areas are and get a feel for how they look from different viewpoints.