EU-funded Robominers project tackles mining challenges
The European Union is to fund a new project through its Horizon 2020 programme that is looking to revolutionise underground mining through development of a “bio-inspired, modular and reconfigurable robot-miner” that can access small and difficult to reach underground mineral deposits.
The 48-month long project, named Robominers, held its first meeting in Madrid in June.
The long-term strategic objective of the project is to facilitate EU access to raw materials, in particular those considered strategic or important to the global energy transition, from domestic resources. The project is seen as an important part of the the effort to decrease the EU's import dependency.
The European Commission has said that the approach taken by Robominers is to combine the creation of a new mining ecosystem with innovative ideas from other sectors, especially "disruptive concepts from robotics".
Utilising a mining robot will be especially useful for accessing mineral deposits that are difficult to reach or it small spaces. These spaces include abandoned, usually flooded mines, that conventional mining techniques have, until now, not been able to reach, as well as already explored places whose exploitation was considered uneconomic.
Throughout the duration of the project, the consortium behind it is aiming to:
- Construct a fully functional modular robot miner prototype following a bio-inspired design, capable of operating, navigating and performing selective mining in a flooded underground environment;
- Design a mining ecosystem of expected future upstream/downstream raw materials processes via simulations, modelling and virtual prototyping;
- Validate all key functions of the robot-miner to a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4;
- Use the prototypes to study and advance future research challenges concerning scalability, resilience, re-configurability, self-repair, collective behaviour, operation in harsh environments, selective mining, production methods as well as for the necessary converging technologies on an overall mining ecosystem level.
The consortium is headed by the Centre for Automation and Robotics (CAR) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Overall there are 14 partners from 11 EU countries working on the Robominers project. These partners bring skills and know-how from a wide range of specialities, including geo-scientific SMEs, academics from both robotics and mining, NGOs and Government bodies.
The dissemination and communication efforts within Robominers will be led by the European Federation of Geologists (EFG), which can bring its broad network of more than 45,000 geoscientists from across the continent.
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