Could robots take over mining work?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
Lisa Mullins talks to Mechanical Engineering Professor Mark Yim to find out whether robots can one day do the dangerous mining work that humans now do.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: The high-tech equipment involved in the rescue attempt is impressive. It makes you wonder whether technology might be able to prevent mining accidents from happening in the first place. Well, it turns out that engineers are working on it. They’re hoping to outsource some of the actual mining to robots. Mark Yim is an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Mark, as you likely know, more than 2,500 people die every year in mining accidents worldwide. It is such a risky proposition, sending people down deep into the earth. I wonder if there is a technology that exists right now that will enable robots to do the job miners do.

MARK YIM:  The automating of machines that do that type of digging extraction and all that type of stuff is happening and it’s fairly straight forward, especially what you can do is you have the machines that do the digging and rather than having people do it, you can do it remotely. I don’t actually know of anything that’s currently being done explicitly that will replace miners now, but the technology to do that automation is moving forward.

MULLINS:  And why is it taking so long? I mean mining has been going on for ages and there have been deaths for ages. It’s always been an extremely dangerous job. Why has the technology not caught up yet?

YIM: There’s a variety of things. People are really good at seeing things and observing things. Having machines that can do the same type of perception is actually something that’s very difficult. Where people can often notice things that’s very easy to them, having a machine notice that is actually very difficult.

MULLINS: But there would be a camera. And I think of something like surgery that happens microscopically using a camera even at a geographic distance. If it can be done in such a tiny, fragile level such as that, why not in a mine?

YIM: That’s a great question. Theoretically, things like that could work, but it turns out that when you’re in a different situation where you have a very unstructured environment in which you don’t actually know what it might be like, having a camera down there actually doesn’t work by itself. Say, for surgery, you know what it’s supposed to look like and when you have a camera down there you know when something’s wrong. When you’re down in some mining area that you have no idea what it actually should look like, it’s very difficult to tell is this particular soil that you’re looking at, or rock, or whatever that you’re looking at, how far away is it? How hard is it? What are the characteristics? It’s actually very difficult to do even if you have a human looking at it through a camera.

MULLINS: But you still think it could happen?

YIM: Oh, yeah. It could definitely happen. So there are technologies that are improving, not only in the camera, but in other sensors. So you can put thinks like ground penetrating radar or other types of spectroscopy so you can actually see the types of minerals can’t see with their eyes, but the machines can figure out even better than having a human down there.

MULLINS: How far away is this from reality?

YIM: That I don’t know. There’s always a question of cost and whether we are close to that is more of a question of people putting the effort to make that happen.

MULLINS:  It sounds like you’re saying that there’s a lack of effort right now. Are mining companies interested in developing robotics?

YIM: So I have talked to some mining companies in the past about possibilities for doing this and there have always been kind of remote interest, but I’ve never actually had or seen people, mining companies, actually supporting that work.

MULLINS: How could that be, given the number of losses?

YIM: Well, that’s a good question. Is there an ethical issue about how much money should we put into this type of work which could save lives versus the extra cost in actually making it happen and the cost of developing it?

MULLINS: So what about having robots conduct rescue operations? Is that being done anywhere and could it be soon?

YIM: Yes, I think that’s a lot closer to the horizon. The technology is really close at the moment to actually do that type of rescue, to put robots that could go down small holes, relatively deep, to see if they can find people, or to deliver things to them, being able to navigate through tunnels and that type of thing. That technology’s very close to making an impact.

MULLINS: Alright. Thanks very much for talking to us. Mark Yim, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks again, Mark.

YIM: Sure. Thanks.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.