Events & Courses

Event Overview:

Time: 5:30pm for 6:00pm 

Speaker: Adrian Charters (Geological Director of Quarry Design Ltd)

QuarryDesign is a geological and geotechnical consultancy specialising in remote mapping and the acquisition of field data by terrestrial LiDAR and UAV, primarily in the UK & European mining and quarrying sector. The UAV platform has proven itself to obtain both topographical and geological data in numerous quarrying situations and in conjunction with our ILRIS long-range LiDAR received "Runner-Up" in the November 2013 MPA Safety Awards.

Until the development of LiDAR and more recently commercial UAV systems; the collection of some survey, geological and geotechnical data has been difficult to obtain safely and quickly in the quarry or mine environment. In this paper, the use of UAV’s will be presented and will feature many examples of how high quality Digital Surface Models (DSMs) have been created of features that would have been dangerous or impossible to survey traditionally. The paper also addresses the training, legislation, UAV types / payloads and flight planning methodology required for operating UAV’s in a safe manner.

Live video streaming from the UAV to a base station has also enabled safe quarry face inspections to be undertaken often alleviating the need for roped access face inspections or enabling a more targeted roped access inspection to be planned.

Specific case studies from the UK and Europe will be shown and the geological and geotechnical data derived to produce high quality DSM’s / Point Clouds with orthophotography used for further geological and geotechnical analysis.