Abstract
The South African Mine Health and Safety Act (MHSA) requires the mine surveyor to inform the
manager of all workings within 100 metres of other workings, abandoned areas and hazardous
accumulations of water or gas. The main purpose of this requirement is to ensure that all employees
are aware and can take all the necessary precautions against un‐planned breakthroughs, falls of
ground and subsidence. In the case where mines are mining through abandoned workings in order
to remove remnant pillars and previously unmined reserves, the potential for subsidence and
equipment falling into excavated areas become a reality. A single incident where a machine falls into
a collapsed working can amount to in excess of R1 million per incident, excluding the risk of loss of
life or serious injury. An unplanned collapse of workings in the specific case study can also lead to
sufficient air flow into the old underground to cause spontaneous combustion of the remaining
pillars. Although systems for navigation of drill rigs exist the cost to deploy a similar unit to all
vehicles in the mining area is prohibitive. A low‐cost system that can navigate a vehicle and indicate
to the operator what the subsurface features look like in the direct surroundings of the vehicle was
developed using off‐the‐shelf technologies. This paper discusses the process of developing a lowcost
navigation system towards a real time information management system for a mining operation.
Benefits from this system may be applied in underground navigation and guiding rescue services in
the search of illegal miners in abandoned mines.