Abstract
Being underground is dangerous, it really is. People shouldn’t go there if they don’t
need to, especially in an age where driverless cars by Google and shopping delivery by
Amazon are on the brink of implementation in unstructured public environments; but
held up, not by technology, but by wrangling about legislation covering liability
determination, and fears of hacking drive-by-wire systems. Underground mining is a
secure (from an IT perspective), structured, and predictable environment with limited
and controlled human access – an ideal place for automated or remotely piloted systems.
This paper outlines the semi-structured interview process that was executed to
determine the requirements for an underground remotely piloted aerial system (URPAS).
The potential applications are explored; including search and rescue, the
business-orientated activity of regularly scanning rockpasses to predict and prevent
blockages, and scanning a blocked rockpass to determine the blockage location and
structure. An even more ’out-of-the-box’ application, using the vehicle to deliver
explosives to the underside of a blockage, was included in the brainstorming
discussions. Interviews with ten mining and unmanned aerial systems experts were
conducted with a questionnaire as the primary data collection tool. The questionnaires
were analysed to determine the representatively of the sample set, and therefore the
validity of the gathered data, based upon expertise ratings in each of the relevant areas
of knowledge: mining, surveying and mapping, and remote-piloted aerial systems. The
goal was to identify the key performance requirements of a U-RPAS, and determine the
feasibility of such a system being developed. A specialized company providing a
scanning service emerged the preferred implementation method, and the rationale for
this choice is presented. As context, the sub-system prototypes used in the brainstorming
section of the interviews are presented, as are the implementation scenarios discussed in
the interviews. It is thus shown that this method of requirements elicitation is suitable
for this type of technology implementation project.