As a Chief Surveyor at an active mine, managing your team requires a mix of technical expertise and knowing when to deploy the right personnel and technology at the right time. A mine isn’t a static location. Structures both above ground and below are constantly changing, and you need to adjust and deploy your team to document differences that are often too small to be detected by the human eye.
Any delay in surveying can ripple through blasting, hauling, and processing schedules. Decisions have to be made fast, and as the chief surveyor, it starts with you. The tools you choose determine whether production keeps moving or grinds to a halt.
The Nexys ecosystem provides you and your team with the flexibility to increase efficiency while tackling surveying challenges in less time. After fully leveraging its features, you and your surveying team won't be able to imagine working without it.
Your typical week starts with an assignment to map recently blasted stopes for void analysis. The drill and blast crew has cleared the area, and now it’s safe to survey the cavity. It’s a 40-foot by 80-foot area, which will be quick work for the Nexys to autonomously explore after being mounted to a drone. After 5-10 minutes of setup time it’s ready to begin scanning the stope, providing real-time point cloud data directly to a connected tablet.
As the scan progresses, your surveyor can already detect that there was a possible overrun on the western side of the stope. Noticing these critical areas mid-scan allows your surveyor to double back to ensure they’re getting the most accurate data possible.
In 5-10 minutes, the stope is fully mapped, and after the log has been processed your survey team can already be making critical decisions for future blasting.
Not that long ago, this would have taken you an entire afternoon and several of your surveyors to be tied to one location. With Nexys, your teams can be efficient and mobile, mapping stopes in an hour and moving onto the next. It’s just one example of how LiDAR-based SLAM units like Nexys allow you to do more with less.
Deeper in the mine, another one of your surveyors is using a vehicle-mounted Nexys for critical drift convergence monitoring. After connecting the Nexys vehicle mount to the top of a utility vehicle, your survey team can map even farther underground – capturing long drifts and their pre-surveyed ground control points for careful repeat monitoring.
With the speed of the Nexys on-board processing, the vehicle can move at nearly 10 mph and still achieve survey-grade accuracy needed for convergence monitoring after being constrained through ground-control points. In around 10 minutes, full cross-sectional data is captured for the entire tunnel, and the data is ready for post-processing.
Back at your office, you get the email alert that your surveyor has already uploaded the drift data to the shared folder. You alert the engineering teams, and that’s another assignment off your plate. The end of the month is always a hectic time during mine operations. Having Nexys to quickly tackle month-end tasks means one less thing to stress over.
Back above ground, it’s time for ore reconciliation and stockpile monitoring. Your mine’s location has access to strong GPS/GNSS signals that can be fed into SLAM for above-ground mapping, so you use the Nexys attached to an aerial drone to start your scan. Using predetermined waypoints, the Nexys controls the drone in a set pattern to take precise volumetric measurements without the need for piloting.
Even if GPS signals are unavailable in the area, Nexys is still capable of mapping the area fully autonomously as long as there are enough features nearby to keep SLAM stable. Last month, GPS signals were lost in one area of the mining site, but the Nexys automatically switched to autonomous navigation as soon as it detected that the GPS signal was weak. The seamless change prevented any work or time from being lost during the reconciliation.
As Chief Surveyor, you’re already expected to be a jack of all trades. Delivering different data to different engineering groups and fully understanding the data has always been part of the job.
Throughout the week, the mine site manager has seen all the swift surveying work your team was able to handle with the Nexys above- and below-ground, so they ask them to monitor recent construction progress on the new administration complex being built on the east side of the mine.
For this task, the Nexys in handheld or backpack mode is all you need. This allows you to walk through the different unfinished sections and get a clear scan of every beam, pillar, and wall. Beyond the structural elements, the first electrical and HVAC sections are being installed, and these need to be monitored and added to the ongoing as-built documentation. Thankfully your team can monitor the Nexys scan through the tablet to ensure complete coverage and prevent any needless rework that can delay projects.
Nexys is allowing surveyors to do so much more than previously thought possible. It seamlessly transitions between above-ground tasks and those below the surface. A single operator can now replace several surveyors and cover a larger area in less time, and with more accuracy.
To witness Nexys in action, contact us today to book your free personalized demo.
