In underground mining it is required to maintain safe operational conditions, for which the physical displacement of the walls of the tunnels and galleries that make up the mining infrastructure is monitored, identifying early on potential risks to people and equipment. In the field of geomechanics, the process of measuring the displacement of the walls of an excavation is called convergence monitoring, a common practice in mining and is used to qualify the state of the fortification/infrastructure and trigger maintenance actions if necessary. Currently, LiDAR Slam instrumentation is used to generate a large amount of data (point clouds), which are processed manually through stages of cleaning, recording and measuring displacement of tunnel walls (convergence measurement), which represent a high demand of time and human resources, delaying decision-making in a timely manner.

Identify technological solutions to facilitate the processing, analysis and reporting of convergence measurements in under ground mining for opportune decision making.

The proposed technological solution should consider the following requirements:

• Platform (software) for point clouds processing (one billion points generated daily) corresponding to topographic information generated with LiDAR equipment. The processing must include the cleaning of topographic data from other objects or bodies (equipment, vehicles and people) captured with the LiDAR.
• Maximum quality and efficiency in the processing of large volumes of data. It is desirable to identify differences in millimeters between reported surfaces (quality) and to process a high volume of daily data (billion points per day) with low labor consumption (efficiency).
• Compare point clouds (daily data versus previous measurement), align and register surfaces.
• Quantify distances between surfaces generated by each point cloud.
• Visualization of results.
• Ability to integrate information from other sources (CAD, georeferenced instrumentation data and images), in order to consolidate geomechanical information data in just one place.
• Web reporting (viewable in the Integrated Operations Center room).
• A lightweight, integrated and agnostic solution for geomechanical monitoring systems is desirable.
• Comply with Codelco’s security and communications standards.

The following will not be considered in the background evaluation process:

• Advisories, consultancies or engineering studies.
• Proposals that only consider the survey of topographic information.

Manual processing of clouds of millions of points surveyed by LiDAR instrumentation makes it difficult to make timely decisions for the maintenance of safe conditions in under ground galleries.

• Safety risks due to late decision making for fortification/infrastructure maintenance in subway mines.
• High demand of human resources for data processing.

On a permanent basis.

For the convergence measurement, one billion points per day (approx. 25 GB of data) are captured with LiDAR Slam in the field (approx. 3 hours), followed by manual processing, cleaning, registration and measurement of tunnel wall displacements (approx. 10 hours).

No technologies have been identified for what is required to generate a significant improvement in the KPIs presented.