Autonomous Multi-robot Behaviours for Safety Inspection under the Constraints of Underground Mine Terrains

The wide adoption of underground mining has contributed immensely to the rapid growth of the countries’ economy, job creation, gross domestic product, fixed capital formation, gross investment and merchandise exports on an enormous global scale. At the same time, the tedious and dangerous nature of underground mining makes it vulnerable to mine accidents and disasters, such as the fall of loose rocks, trapping of miners and miners’ death. Building upon a comprehensive survey of safety inspection issues in South Africa, this paper proposes an autonomous multi-robot cooperative behavioural model that can help to guide multi-robots in pre-entry safety inspection of the underground mines. We discuss in detail the different safety fears in underground mines and categorise these issues into mine-related and roboticrelated disasters, the latter being classified according to random component failures, human errors, software failures and systematic hardware faults. We present an empirical analysis of how our proposed model can be used or implemented through two real-life scenarios: a) the inspection of rock falls and b) the detection of gas levels in underground mines. This survey can be used as a reference guide to understand safety management and cooperative behavioural models for underground mines and to conduct further research on the existing models to make them more efficient, reliable and scalable, which can promote their use in larger mines and