An evaluation of local autonomy applied to teleoperated vehicles in underground mines

Autonomous vehicles are being increasingly introduced in the mining industry. While these may offer high safety and high productivity, fully autonomous solutions are not always applicable or economically viable. Teleoperation is an attractive option, since it increases safety and comfort of the drivers. Unfortunately, the difficulty to operate the vehicle remotely often results in reduced productivity. In this paper, we show that techniques from the field of mobile robotics can be used to mitigate this problem. We extend a commercial teleoperation system for use in underground mines with a local autonomy functionality, with the main purpose to evaluate if the achieved productivity improvement motivates development of general algorithms and a fully commercial implementation. We then describe a user study performed in an underground mine with a 38 tonne articulated wheel loader, which proves that local autonomy gives a significant improvement in productivity of the teleoperation system, while retaining or even reducing the maintenance costs.