Using unmanned aerial vehicles for open mining areas: Current applications and future potentials

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are preferred in a variety of applications such as forestry, precise agriculture and disaster management due to the good coverage of study area provided by high-resolution photographs in a short period of time. Due to its richness of natural and geographic features, Turkey has a real potential to use these instruments in many different application, especially in the cut and fill calculations of the open pit mines. The most important advantage of using UAV in open mines is to increase productivity in many aspects like time, cost, accuracy and safety without reducing work force. In this study, potential usage of unmanned aerial vehicles in open mines has been investigated. A marble mine located in the province of Antalya was selected as the study area. Related data was collected by means of a rotorcraft type UAV. The reason of preferring this type of UAV is its maneuverability during the monitoring for smaller areas with complex surfaces and no require large space for rotation at the end of the strips relative to the fixed-wing type. After the photographs were taken, 3D models were created and cut and fill (volume) calculations were done very quickly, to evaluate the daily changes occurred in the mining area. Another main advantage of using UAV for similar studies is to prevent any possible accidents that may cause serious injure or even death of the people who are trying to evaluate these changes by the help of new derivative data sets such as the terrain gradient created on the model and their interpretation. Depending on the location of the mine, it is possible to determine the effect of the studies carried out on the natural environment temporally, such as forestry area. Just the opposite, it is possible to determine the potential for influencing the mine by any flood of natural resource such as the basin, dam or stream bed which is located near the mine and is not adversely affected by the mine.