Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for 3D topographic Mapping and Monitoring the Air Quality of Open-pit Mines

Recently remarkable advancement development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been observed and their applications have been shown in many fields such as agriculture, industry, and environmental management. However, in the mining industry, the application of UAV technology remains potential. This paper presents a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle technology-based system for 3D mapping and air quality monitoring at open-pit mine sites in Vietnam. The system includes several dust sensors that are mounted on a low-cost rotary-wing type UAV. The system collects a variety of data, mainly images and airborne pollutant concentrations. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, field tests were carried out at the Coc Sau coal mine. Based on the images transmitted to the ground monitoring station, large scale 3D topographic maps were successfully modeled. In addition, sensors mounted on the UAV system were able to monitor the levels of environmental variables associated with the air quality within the pit such as temperature, dust, CO, CO2, and NOx. The field test results in this study illustrate the applicability of the low-cost UAV for the 3D mapping and the air quality monitoring at large and deep coal pits with relatively high accuracy.