Safe Integration of Autonomous Machines in Underground Mining Environments

Autonomous and Semi-Autonomous Machines (ASAMs) provide several benefits and have already emerged in mining environments. However, for cost-efficiency reasons and for ASAMs to reach their full potential, they should be capable of operating seamlessly with manually operated machines. Establishing the requirements for sufficient safety for such integration is a non-trivial task. This paper proposes a methodology for safely integrating ASAMs in underground mining environments. First, we describe the purpose of the integration and define the constituent components. Second, we identify the conditions that ASAMs will likely encounter using ODD-UM, an operational design domain specification for underground mining. Third, we derive high-level requirements for individual components based on ODD-UM attributes. Such requirements are allocated into the constituent components and considered as assumptions for the safety analysis. Fourth, we perform STPA (System-theoretic Process Analysis) to analyze safety-related control requirements for the integrated system. Our methodology could help the system integrator to systematically identify integration requirements to be enforced in constituent components and safety control systems.