Modeling, controlling, and monitoring telerobotics based mine operations as discrete event systems

摘要

During the last few decades, there have been significant advances in the area of sensing, computing, communication, and control technologies. These advances have led us to believe that the productivity of underground mining can be significantly improved by the deployment of semiautonomous machines in such operations. It is envisioned that with the help of the next generation of teleoperation technology, an operator in a surface control room will supervise a group of semiautonomous mining machines performing operations in underground mines. These machines may be required to share resources (e.g., intersections, drifts). For collision and deadlock free sharing of these resources, these machines must cooperate with each other. This paper shows the use of discrete event formalism for collision and deadlock free sharing of resources among multiple machines in such operations. In an unstructured environment, like underground mining, completion times of different tasks appear to be stochastic. In order to maximize the productivity of such stochastic operations, dynamic scheduling of these machines is necessary. In this paper, it is shown that dynamic scheduling of the operations of these machines can be achieved by controlling and monitoring telerobotics based underground mine operations as discrete event systems (DES).