Drill planning for mining machines

The mining industry uses large machines to drill holes in the ground, which are then filled with explosive in order to blow up huge volumes of rock. Together with Atlas Copco, the AASS lab develops algorithms for automatically computing in which order the holes have to be drilled, and along which paths the machines should move.

A basic algorithm has already been developed at AASS, but we believe that better and novel approaches can easily be devised. The task of the student is to come up with alternative approaches, implement and compare them. A good understanding of search techniques (breadth-first, depth-first, etc.) is required.

Contact: Fabien Lagriffoul