MEET JULIUS, THE MINING ROBOTS
There is no playing around with Legos for Julius, another robot system working in Freiberg. His job is a much tougher one: The team of the Mining-ROX project at TU Freiberg, Europe’s only university with a research and teaching mine, is exploring how autonomous robots like Julius can help remove dangerous tasks from human workers in mining and also aid in rescue scenarios.
Mining has always been a very risky job and working underground is difficult: The atmosphere is hot, humid and lacks oxygen. Permanent dangers like tunnel collapse or explosions are a real threat to workers – and it will only get worse in the future: As surface level minerals are used up, mines continue to get deeper with the deepest mines going over 2 miles underground. Conditions almost unbearable for humans, but no problem for robots like Julius. Named after the German Mathematician and Engineer Julius Weisbach, the robot is one of the two robotic research platforms of the project. It consists of a UR5 robot arm with a Robotiq 3-Finger Gripper, based on an Innok Robotics vehicle.
One of Julius’s roles so far is to act as an assistant during my surveying tasks. The robot accompanies a human surveyor, carrying the heavy equipment and collecting sensory data with handheld measurement devices that have been designed for use by humans. Another scenario, where the robot would be teleoperated, is the exploration of mine areas that are unsafe for humans, for example in disaster cases or abandoned mines. To be able to do that, the robot has to establish a data communication link to the base station by placing WiFi relay stations throughout the mine. Looking ahead, Prof. Bernhard Jung from TU Freiberg says: “The deep mines of the future will be very hot places and ventilation and cooling systems will be economically prohibitive. In fact, a long-term vision in the mining research community is the fully automated "man-less mine".”
Those are just two great examples for the huge potential of robotic assistance systems and we are curious to see what scientists will come up with next. Colleague robot, please assist!
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