In underground mining, knowing exactly where a vehicle is located is mission-critical. Traditional navigation relies on GPS signals, which disappear the moment a vehicle enters a portal or adit. To compensate, mines often install expensive fixed infrastructure, such as Wi-Fi beacons or radio tags, which can be time-consuming and costly as they must be regularly maintained to keep up with the rapidly advancing mine face.
To overcome this, Chimera Land from Advanced Navigation is a 3D Laser Velocity Sensor (LVS) specifically designed to solve a challenge faced by underground mining: maintaining precise vehicle positioning in deep, dark, and unmapped environments where GPS cannot reach.
When fused with an Advanced Navigation inertial navigation system (INS), Chimera Land allows underground vehicles to maintain stable navigation over extended distances and time. Instead of needing to ‘ask’ an external beacon or satellite for its location, the sensor uses specialised lasers to measure a vehicle’s ground-relative 3D velocity with high accuracy. By feeding this precise data into the vehicle’s INS, the sensor eliminates the inherent “drift” that typically comes with standalone INS.
This integration is made possible with AdNav Intelligence, the company’s sophisticated proprietary software. Drawing on adaptive algorithms, the fusion engine dynamically weights the input from each sensor, adjusting reliance in real time based on their reliability scores, environmental conditions, and operational context.
The result is a resilient, high-performance, infrastructure-light positioning solution that excels in the high-dust, zero-light conditions typical of underground mines.
“Development areas in mining have long been held back by fragile external infrastructure and complex setups that struggle to keep pace with a moving mine face,” says Vandecar.
“Chimera Land changes that. By providing a fully onboard, self-contained solution, we’ve eliminated the ‘positioning gap’. Even in the deepest, unmapped headings, we turn navigational guesswork into absolute operational certainty, ensuring that autonomous fleets keep moving without interruption.”
Proven in Europe’s Deepest Mine
To prove its resilience, Chimera Land was demonstrated in Europe’s deepest underground mine, a 1.4km deep labyrinth. When integrated with Advanced Navigation’s high-performance Boreas D90 INS, the solution achieved a position accuracy of 99.9% of distance travelled. Crucially, this performance was maintained without relying on any fixed positioning infrastructure, pre-existing maps, or external aiding.
Key performance benchmarks include:
- Precision at depth: The system delivered a final position error of 15.9m over a 22.9km transit (approx. 52 ft over 14 miles) at 1.4km underground.
- INS drift reduction: In a world where inertial sensors inherently “drift” or lose their way over time, Chimera Land actively reduced the drift rate to a mere 0.07% per distance travelled.
- Repeatable accuracy: Validated across five separate runs, the system consistently hit an accuracy of better than 0.1%.
- Infrastructure-light: Enables full vehicle autonomy even where fixed networks and infrastructure end.
Chimera Land is available to purchase today.
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