Enhanced vision system for vehicle teleoperation in adverse climatic conditions

摘要

Open pit operation in Codelco's Andina Division is interrupted in the presence of adverse climatic conditions; namely, snow fall in the winter season. Specifically, when snowfall is over the 4cm/h threshold the climate condition is considered adverse, and all manual operations are stopped due to the high level of risk that operators would be exposed to.The project “Application of Autonomous Mining in Open Pit Operations, Stage I” is currently under development. This project aims to teleoperate mining vehicles, thus providing them with the technology needed to operate remotely in adverse climatic conditions. By this means, operating time is increased and operators risk exposure is decreased. Afterwards, this technology will be available to be adapted for other Codelco divisions.Semi-autonomous vehicles will be operated from a remote and safe location. Therefore it is essential for the teleoperator to have as much as possible information about the operating environment.In this work, a solution for the visualization of the machine environment is analyzed. This solution involves the fusion of information from different sensors to provide an enhanced vision system for operators. The components of the system are a visible spectrum camera, a far infrared spectrum (thermal) camera, a RADAR, and a LIDAR. Together, these sensors allow the detection of obstacles, and provide the teleoperator with visual feedback fused with additional distance-to-obstacles information. Through this development, vehicles in the so-called “Autonomous Island” will continue to operate during snowstorms and other adverse climatic conditions.The conclusions are that the visible camera worked better than expected, which is not the case for thermal camera. The thermal camera is a complement to the camera in the visible spectrum and not on the the other side. The LIDAR worked good forall conditions; the multieco sensor allows useful readings even with lots of snow. The RADAR sensor did not affect their behavior in the different climatic conditions with long range detection.Results of the tests are positive, indicating that the prototype will work as expected. The next step is to test the sensors on mining equipment in one real production cycle with different weather conditions.