Digital transformations in drive control technology for exploration and mining equipment

Background. Technologies applied in geological exploration and mining are undergoing rapid transformations. The scientific progress in this field, which is shifting towards Asia, is characterized by the integration of network and production technologies. The modern society can be conventionally divided into the creative part, i.e. people designing digital technologies, and those operating these technologies. This has become particularly evident with the advancement of the 4th generation of automatics. The period of massive digital transformation started in 2008–2009 with the appearance of the Internet of Things (IoT). This process acquired the term Industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).Aim. To study current digital transformations in drive control technology applied in exploration and mining equipment.Materials and methods. Methods and examples of controlling exploration and mining equipment are presented.Results. The main trends in the development of drive control technology applied in exploration and mining equipment were examined.Conclusion. Modern digital control systems are capable of re-programming controllers using an active or passive identification of multicomponent multiloop controlled objects in real time. The new Flight Contol Language (FCL) designed for programmable controllers incorporates the methods of fuzzy logic [5,8]. This fuzzy control language uses a new type of data — a linguistic variable, which is a numerical variable with a name, e.g. pressure, rotation speed, temperature, etc., involved in linguistic descriptions.