The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
North of 60 Mining News - March 8, 2024
Exyn Technologies' mapping system pairs a rotating lidar unit with a fully autonomous aerial drone for faster, safer, and more accurate underground mine mapping.
Exyn Technologies' drone-based mapping system is faster, more accurate, and infinitely safer than traditional underground mine surveying technologies, according to a recent study completed at Northern Star Resources Ltd.'s Pogo gold mine in Alaska.
"[T]he data doesn't even compare," said Andrew Loomes, chief mine surveyor at Pogo.
Exyn is working at the cutting edge of two technologies related to underground mine mapping.
First and foremost, the Philadelphia-based tech company is a pioneer in the development of aerial drones capable of autonomously navigating complex subterranean environments that are beyond the reach of the global positioning system.
Exyn's drone's Level 4 autonomy – which means it can detect and avoid objects without the assistance of humans or GPS while carrying out preprogrammed missions – is coupled with a lidar 3D mapping system that offers unmatched flexibility, speed, and accuracy for surveying and inspecting mines.
Together, these technologies allow surveyors to map and inspect underground mine passages faster and more accurately from a safe and comfortable location.
"It is infinitely safer to use ... we're nowhere near the brow now, doing jobs around the corner in some cases," said Loomes.
Looking for a method to efficiently and accurately map Pogo, which had been in operation for more than a decade when Northern Star acquired the mine in 2018, the Australia-based gold mining company was an early adopter of Exyn's drone-based mapping technology.
"They were not entirely confident in their control points, so they were looking for an accurate, easy, and rapid way to survey this mine – that is where our technology was a great fit for them," said Jack Gentry, an Exyn Technologies engineer that went to Pogo during the initial remapping of the mine in 2022.
Jim Coxon, Northern Star Resources Vice President of Operations, North America, said the initial Exyn drone surveys of the Pogo mine proved substantially faster and more accurate than the old-school cavity monitoring system (CMS) traditionally used for underground mine mapping.
"The drone is able to scan all parts of the mining void in a lot more detail, it almost seems like you are looking at a photo of the mining void," the Northern Star executive told Data Mine North in a 2022 email. "This detail provides accurate void information and allows the interpretation of geological features within the void."
Surveyors are able to receive real-time visualization of data captured by Exyn drones with full detail and colorization to ensure the area is completely and accurately scanned.
Northern Star was so impressed with the technology that the mining company purchased two Exyn drones to continue mapping the new ramps, drifts, and stopes it develops to feed high-grade gold ore into the expanded and upgraded mill at Pogo.
A recent study confirms and documents Northern Star's original observations.
According to this side-by-side comparison, Exyn's drone-mounted mapping system lacks the limitations of traditional CMS methods, has greater capacity to detect things like gas pockets, and can collect much more accurate data in nearly half the time.
Loomes says the time comparison – 15 minutes for the Exyn survey versus 27.3 minutes for a CMS survey of the same area – does not fully reflect the time, effort, and expense it would take to collect Exyn-level data quality with CMS.
"Even though [CMS] takes twice as long, from a quality standpoint to get the same data from a CMS would take even longer with more equipment ... the data doesn't even compare," he said.
The safety factor, however, may have been the biggest selling point for Northern Star and its team at Pogo.
"The safety aspect is definitely one of the driving factors to why we purchased the gear," said Loomes.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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