Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for 3D topographic Mapping and Monitoring the Air Quality of Open-pit Mines

Abstract

Recently remarkable advancement development of unmannedaerial vehicles (UAVs) has been observed and their applications have beenshown in many fields such as agriculture, industry, and environmentalmanagement. However, in the mining industry, the application of UAVtechnology remains potential. This paper presents a low-cost unmannedaerial vehicle technology-based system for 3D mapping and air qualitymonitoring at open-pit mine sites in Vietnam. The system includes severaldust sensors that are mounted on a low-cost rotary-wing type UAV. Thesystem collects a variety of data, mainly images and airborne pollutantconcentrations. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, fieldtests were carried out at the Coc Sau coal mine. Based on the imagestransmitted to the ground monitoring station, large scale 3D topographicmaps were successfully modeled. In addition, sensors mounted on theUAV system were able to monitor the levels of environmental variablesassociated with the air quality within the pit such as temperature, dust, CO,CO2, and NOx. The field test results in this study illustrate the applicabilityof the low-cost UAV for the 3D mapping and the air quality monitoring atlarge and deep coal pits with relatively high accuracy.