With more frequent surveys at his disposal, Thim is able to track material movement more closely and make his billing statements more exact, reducing the potential for disputes. Now, instead of spending all day walking across stockpiles to capture potentially shoddy measurements, he’s standing by and flying above them in a fraction of the time and getting accurate volumes every time he surveys. According to Kristoffer Gustafson, Business Area Manager at SITECH, “Peab’s aggregates division was an early adopter of drone surveys and they used products that are easily scaled to grow their pilot team from just a few pilots to ~70 pilots in the first three years.” Peab’s long-standing relationship with SITECH Sweden made the journey to drones not only attainable, but an effortless addition to their existing workflows. Thim convinced management to get their own drone that they could fly any time they wanted, and to start processing their data into interactive, measurable site models with Propeller. Tired of waiting for their annual drone survey for truly accurate measurements and site-wide visualizations. Using drones to survey faster and manage inventory This made everything from pit planning to developing haul roads a less-than-exact science that caused project delays. Instead, Thim had to resort to 2D surveys that only depicted contour lines. In addition, mine planning was difficult without accurate, actionable visualizations of the quarry. Then we’d plan where to extract next, based on this very dubious data,” says Thim. “We just went out to the quarry, looked around, and estimated how much material there was. During those long stretches between surveys, Rådasand’s team resorted to guesswork. “Measuring a pile manually is time consuming and therefore we didn’t do it that often.”īecause of the obstacles they faced, Rådasand often chose not to even attempt these measurements, instead waiting for an annual drone survey from a third party to supply them with a single, contextless snapshot of their site that day. “We used a GPS stick to shoot some geo-located points, and then we measured the stockpiles manually with measuring tape to estimate the volume,” says Thim. Unfortunately, getting accurate volumes of each stockpile was a long, tedious, dangerous process using a base and rover. Having this information makes it possible for Rådasand to get paid for all their work in a timely fashion, plan future work, and optimize their processes based on material movement patterns. Thim needs to know how much sand and gravel his team has extracted, processed, and moved off site per week, in addition to maintaining an up-to-date inventory of each and every stockpile. For example, flatter stockpiles will benefit more from a high GSD than taller stockpiles.Challenge: Lack of visibility on site and inaccurate stockpile volumesĪs with any quarry, stockpile management is crucial to optimizing profits. Vertically, they lower the uncertainty in Z values, which is proportional to the resolution. Horizontally, high-resolution photogrammetric results create more precise stockpile models, and thus better volume measurement accuracy than ones interpolated from certain measured points. A photogrammetric survey with a fine ground sampling distance (GSD, which indicates the actual distance each pixel represents) is able to better describe irregular stockpiles in detail. When it comes to stockpile volume measurements, stockpiles do not conform to a perfect shape. Why use photogrammetry for stockpile volume measurements? High-resolution images give you more details of the mapped stockpiles These top mining companies claim that by applying the photogrammetry workflow with Pix4Dmapper, they can achieve measurement accuracies of around 2-5% for their stockpile volumes. Of the biggest 40 mining companies announced in PWC’s mining report, nearly half of them use Pix4Dmapper photogrammetry software for stockpile measurement and volume comparison as part of their mining workflow.Ĭalculating and managing stockpile inventory, that is, finding a solution for accurate volume measurement and easy inventory management, is one of the biggest challenges in the mining industry. Speed and accuracy: that's the reason why most of the largest mining companies use drones and photogrammetry software in their workflow.
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