While autonomation is becoming increasingly common in mining operations, almost all automation systems share a critical vulnerability: they lack advanced autonomy or depend on GPS.
Underground mines, building interiors and tunnels provide no GPS signal, and building GPS-denied navigation from scratch usually requires years and millions of dollars in research and development.
However, there are ways to shorten this path to automation. For example, the Australian government has awarded Emesent, an autonomous mapping and robotics company, a USD 2 million grant to advance robotic systems. The project, valued at USD 5.1 million, is led by Emesent with support from Queensland University of Technology and EPE.
The government’s Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) programme is funding the award, which focuses on the development and commercialisation of Cortex AI. Cortex AI is an open, modular autonomy platform that enables any robotic system or vehicle to navigate, map and operate in challenging and GPS-denied environments.
Cortex AI could decrease time-to-market for robotics applications by eliminating the need to develop GPS-denied autonomy from scratch. This is possible through a hardware-agnostic robotics operating system for aerial and ground robots, as well as vehicle automation. The platform will compress integration timelines through layered APIs and SDKs. Because Cortex AI handles the hard autonomy and AI foundation, partners can invest in domain-specific capability rather than reinventing the navigation stack.
A working prototype of Cortex AI has already been deployed with over a dozen early adopter organisations, some of which are in the mining industry.
Learn more about Emesent’s exploration expertise here.
