TABLE OF CONTENTS Until recently, conventional surveying was the only method available for staking drill patterns and other mining surveying tasks. However, as a result of the harsh mining environment, stakes were often buried or displaced. In addition, drill operators had no precise way of determining the actual drill penetration depth. Likewise, there was no way of monitoring the drill performance in the various geological layers or monitoring the haul trucks in an efficient way. However, more recently the development of modern positioning systems and techniques, particularly RTK GPS, has dramatically improved various mining operations [8, 9]. In open-pit mines, for example, the use of RTK GPS has significantly improved several mining operations such as drilling, shoveling, vehicle tracking, and surveying. RTK GPS provides centimeter-level positioning accuracy and requires only one base receiver to support any number of rovers. As the pit deepens, part of the GPS signal may be blocked by the steep walls of the mine, causing a positioning problem. However, this problem has been successfully overcome by integrating GPS with other positioning systems, mainly the pseudolite system (see Section 9.5) [10].
The mining cycle includes several phases, with ore excavation being one of the most important [11]. Excavating the ore is done by drilling a predefined pattern of blast holes, which are then loaded with explosive charges. The pattern of blast holes is designed in such a way that the size of the rock fragmentation is optimized. As such, it is important that the drills...
