Haul Road Mapping from GPS Traces
This work addresses the tedious and error-prone task of manually updating road maps for automation in mining, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with a new post-processing step.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically mapping dynamic haul roads in open-cut mines using GPS data from trucks, and developed a post-processing step that significantly improved the quality of the road network graph by addressing artefacts in free-drive areas.
Automation in mining requires accurate maps of road networks on site. Because roads on open-cut mines are dynamic in nature and continuously changing, manually updating road maps is tedious and error-prone. This paper investigates the possibility of automatically deriving an accurate representation of the road network using GPS data available from haul trucks operating on site. We present an overview of approaches proposed in literature and test the performance of publicly available methods on GPS data collected from trucks operating on site. Based on shortcomings seen in all tested algorithms, a post-processing step is developed which geometrically analyses the created road map for artefacts typical of free-drive areas on mine sites and significantly improves the quality of the final road network graph.