Huawei’s changing face of coal mining with 5G & AI
Mechanised subterranean coal mine operations are complex and dangerous, and require an abundance of people to work on-site. Safer – and more efficient – mining with few or no personnel working underground is one of the main goals of intelligent mining.
Tunnelling is the most difficult and dangerous of all coal mine operations accounting for more than 40% of all accidents. Underground operational safety relies on manual supervision, which is inefficient; more than half of tunnelling accidents are caused by human error.
Little wonder, then, that the coal mining industry is looking to deploy remotely controlled mining. Yet until recently efforts here have been hampered by technical and physical challenges.
Video-image feedback across fully mechanised mining faces needs hundreds of cameras to be ranged across a coal face that might stretch for as far as half a kilometre. But with mechanised mining being such an unforgiving environment, the optical fibres used in traditional wired solutions are prone to damage, which causes a lot of faults.
Wireless solutions, meanwhile, require high uplink bandwidth and low latency for remote-control signals, and those above ground can view only separate images, meaning there is no single clear view of the entire mine face.
But now, thanks to 5G, networks can offer ultra high-bandwidth, and alos feature uplink-downlink technology that supports real-time wireless HD video imagery consisting of hundreds of channels.
The uplink bandwidth is capable of reaching 1 gigabit per second or more, and AI-driven video-stitching algorithms mean that separate images from hundreds of cameras are combined into 20-metre stretches of coal face that show real-time HD videos.
Also, 5G networks deliver the low latency necessary for remote and precise control of mining machines. This enables mine workers who previously worked underground to remotely control operations from the comfort of an office.
Crucially, AI algorithms mean tunnelling violations and quality issues can not only trigger real-time alarms but also rectify such problems proactively.
Pulling together all of this technology – and allowing hundreds of devices to speak the same language – is MineHarmony, a system that provides a single set of protocols for data sharing between devices, thus enabling human-machine and machine-machine connectivity.
MineHarmony is a collaboration between Huawei and China Energy Investment Corporation, a state-owned mining and energy company, and the solution is designed to improve productivity, sustainability and safety by allowing for 5G-and-AI based remotely operated solutions to be deployed above ground.
Huawei says MineHarmony is the first Internet of Things operating system in the mining sector. It allows miners to connect their mobile phones to mining equipment for visual data display, and to complete mining operations with a tap of a finger.
To date, the system has been deployed on 3,300 sets of equipment in 13 mines and one coal washery.
As well as facilitating the smart control of equipment, and auto-patrolling fixed sites, MineHarmony has shortened the time it takes to upgrade equipment firmware from one day to just four minutes.
Guo Zhenxing is President of Marketing & Solutions for Huawei’s Coal Mining Team. He says MineHarmony embodies the essence of what constitutes an intelligent mine.
He adds: “Such a digital platform allows data assets to be deposited in mines, eliminating information silos, and also unifies interfaces and specifications to simplify platform construction.”
This, he says, “transforms intelligent mines from being construction-driven to being operations-driven”.
Zhenxing continues: “By building a next-generation IoT with cloud platforms as the core, data as a key factor, and security as a safeguard, the Huawei Mine Team is focused on forging a new mode of applications that integrate next-generation IT into the mining sector to forge new modalities for mine companies, supply chain, and the industrial chain.
Looking to the future, he adds that the Mine Team “will work closely with the sector to unleash new value for the mining industry”, adding that this “will help the industry become safer and more efficient, while requiring fewer people for undesirable and dangerous assignments”.
He continued: “The aim is to work with industrial applications and equipment partners to streamline cross-system service data flows and build digital twins.
“Based on an open platform and architecture, ecosystem partners can be agile around iterations and innovation, and quickly meet the needs of coal mining enterprises and improve industry intelligence.”
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