Conceptual design of a test bed for miner rescue

Abstract

In the mining industry, miners are constantly exposed to various safety and health hazards associated with often unpredictable conditions. When an accident occurs, it is difficult for the rescue team to come up with a proper plan for the rescue mission without having adequate knowledge of the situation. One possible approach to managing these hazards is to provide the rescue team with situational awareness such as real-time data regarding the environment (fire, poisonous or explosive gasses), as well as the location and physical condition of the trapped miners. Before starting the rescue mission, and in order to eliminate or reduce the dangers of exposing more humans to the explosive mining environment for information collection, a combination of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. In this project, a conceptual test bed is designed to collect one specific set of information about a trapped miner (in this case, heartrate data). This test bed collects the required data from a heart rate sensor on the trapped miner and transmits it wirelessly to a nearby UAV which will receive the data and send it back to the rescue team via a UGV.