Automatic Determination of Rock-Breaking Target Poses for Impact Hammers

Abstract

This paper describes a system for the automatic determination of rock-breaking target poses for impact hammers used in underground mines. The rock-breaking target pose is defined as the position and angle at which the impact hammer must strike a rock in order to break it. The automatic determination of this pose is essential for the autonomous operation of an impact hammer. The proposed system takes as input sensor data composed of point clouds and images, and automatically determines a rock-breaking target pose. The system consists of a rock segmentation subsystem that receives the sensor data and identifies and individualizes the rocks/boulders present above the grizzly, and a rock-breaking target pose generation and evaluation subsystem that receives the rock information produced by the rock segmentation subsystem, and generates a list of rock-breaking target pose candidates, it evaluates them, and it selects the best candidate as the rock-breaking target pose. The system is evaluated using real data. The reported experiments show the system’s capability to generate appropriate target poses.