Autonomous Vehicles in Underground Mines, Where We Are, Where We Are Going?

Abstract

The mining industry has been acting as a leader in the development of fully autonomous vehicles. Mining equipment manufacturers have been developing and testing autonomous vehicle technologies for many years. There are many ongoing innovations in autonomous vehicle technology. One of these is the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). The DSRC is a one-way or two-way short-to-medium-range wireless communications capability. In this paper, we present a review of the DSRC large-scale fading channel at 5.9 GHz in the tunnels and underground mines. The requirements for DSRC receiver performance for VANET- Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks applications in an underground mine is calculated. This paper also reports the overall performance evaluation of three existing routing protocols, namely, Emergency Message Dissemination for Vehicular Environments (EMDV), Enhanced Multi-Hop Vehicular Broadcast (MHVB), and Efficient Directional Broadcast (EDB) for active safety applications. Finally, a comparative study of these three routing protocols for cooperative collision warning in underground mining galleries was evaluated.