Watch a drone fly through an underground stope

Newmarket Gold is developing a drone to inspect open stopes, map walls and conduct emergency response.

The video of the drone flight, posted by Newmarket Gold, was shot in the company's Fosterville Mine.

"We designed and built our own drone last year," said Ion Hann, Mine Manager of the Fosterville Gold Mine.

"The aim was to develop a way of inspecting our open stopes for misfires etc and to geologically map the walls where possible to reconcile visuals against the model.

"We hope to get to the stage where a drone becomes standard kit for our emergency response teams—especially in search and rescue in the underground environment. We think the possibilities here are tremendous. The opportunities of using the unit to assist with operator training on the job are also apparent, i.e. the unit sending live feed back to a trainer whilst an operator bogs a heading."

Hann says the ultimate goal is to get the unit fully autonomous so that it can perform mine re-entry duties and site inspection duties while operators are still on the surface at shift change.

The unit has a range at the minute of ~150m line of sight and a bit less going around corners.

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