FusionPlanner: A Multi-task Motion Planner for Mining Trucks via Multi-sensor Fusion
This work addresses the problem of autonomous transportation in complex, adverse mining environments for the mining industry, representing a domain-specific incremental advancement.
The authors tackled motion planning for autonomous mining trucks in unstructured open-pit mine environments by proposing FusionPlanner, a multi-task algorithm using multi-sensor fusion, and developed the MiningNav benchmark and Parallel Mining Simulator for evaluation, resulting in a significant reduction in collisions and takeovers.
In recent years, significant achievements have been made in motion planning for intelligent vehicles. However, as a typical unstructured environment, open-pit mining attracts limited attention due to its complex operational conditions and adverse environmental factors. A comprehensive paradigm for unmanned transportation in open-pit mines is proposed in this research. Firstly, we propose a multi-task motion planning algorithm, called FusionPlanner, for autonomous mining trucks by the multi-sensor fusion method to adapt both lateral and longitudinal control tasks for unmanned transportation. Then, we develop a novel benchmark called MiningNav, which offers three validation approaches to evaluate the trustworthiness and robustness of well-trained algorithms in transportation roads of open-pit mines. Finally, we introduce the Parallel Mining Simulator (PMS), a new high-fidelity simulator specifically designed for open-pit mining scenarios. PMS enables the users to manage and control open-pit mine transportation from both the single-truck control and multi-truck scheduling perspectives. The performance of FusionPlanner is tested by MiningNav in PMS, and the empirical results demonstrate a significant reduction in the number of collisions and takeovers of our planner. We anticipate our unmanned transportation paradigm will bring mining trucks one step closer to trustworthiness and robustness in continuous round-the-clock unmanned transportation.