Automated Drill Planning for Multiple-Boom Rigs in Underground Mining

Purpose and goal

AutoBoomer aimed to develop methods for automating drilling operations involved in tunneling. Novel algorithms were developed by the lead partner, Örebro University, for assigning drill targets to, planning, and coordinating the motions of, an arbitrary number of articulated arms. The methods have been demonstrated on real robots in a lab environment and on a simulated Epiroc Boomer. Empirical studies have shown that the method scales to tens of robots with complex kinematic chains.

Expected results and effects

The ultimate aim of AutoBoomer is to provide a concrete step toward reducing the need for humans in drill planning and drill plan execution. The achieved methods contribute to this aim in that they automate precisely those processes which make drilling a highly human-dependent operation in current industrial practice. It is expected that the developed methods will be exploited by manufacturers (e.g., our industrial partner Epiroc) to develop novel automated drilling platforms in the near future.

Planned approach and implementation

The integrated task assignment, trajectory planning, and coordination scheme developed in AutoBoomer is modular. This makes it possible to deploy the motion coordination module separately from the task assignment logic, which could be an off-the-shelf or application-specific component. The algorithms are implemented using a minimal set of dependencies, so as to facilitate integration into other software frameworks. The implementation of the algorithms does not depend on ROS, which is used only to realize the interface with the physical and simulated platforms.