Making mine inspection safer: North Bay drone company inspecting underground cavities.

AuthorKelly, Lindsay
PositionMINING

Mining companies have been adopting drone technology to survey and map mineral resources above ground, but sending the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) below surface is still an emerging concept.

It's an area in which SafeSight Exploration believes there's lots of room for competition, and in which the North Bay company is quickly making a name for itself. The company was the overall winner during a North Bay Pitch event, hosted by the Northern Ontario Angels, in November.

"The idea and the concept and the work towards applying drone technology to an underground setting has been around for a couple of years, but it's still very much an open space where there is no dominant player," said SafeSight's president and founder, Mike Campigotto.

"Some of the bigger players in Europe are now investing millions and millions of dollars trying to figure some of this stuff out, but nobody has claimed any sort of title yet."

Underground, drones can be deployed to do risky, tedious inspections that would otherwise have to be completed by a worker. Whether it's inspecting a drift for wear and tear, or assessing an ore chute for erosion, the drone, using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, can complete a 360-degree survey of an area, serving up "a super accurate, to-the-millimetre survey of the entire cavity," Campigotto said.

Getting a drone to do the work reduces the hazard to the employee, increases the accuracy of the results, and shortens the turnaround time of the data analysis, he noted.

SafeSight entered the fray last year after Campigotto, acting on a suggestion from someone in the industry, assembled a team of experts to work on the concept. The retired entrepreneur, who formerly ran a successful business in the tech industry, reached out to his contacts--a mining engineer, electrical engineer, aviation specialist, geologist, and robotics and software engineer--and got to work.

"Because we have multiple disciplines around the table, we can do rapid innovation and accelerate the development cycle," he said.

Just over a year after launching, Campigotto said the company has caught up to competitors and is close to surpassing what most currently offer the industry.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, SafeSight employs proven, best-in-class technology, such as drones from DJI and LiDAR technology from Velodyne, and builds on it.

Using drones underground presents some unique challenges: components like barometric controls and GPS don't work...

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