Radarize: Advanced Perception and Navigation for Autonomous Underground Vehicles

The mining industry has a strong focus on automation in order to increase resource efficiency and safety, thereby improving environmental and social sustainability. However, visibility is often a great challenge, be it due to dust, water mist, or smoke. Production has downtimes while waiting for the air to clear after blasting. In case of fire, smoke diving in mines is difficult and dangerous. A platform that can move in low-visibility conditions would greatly benefit both productivity and safety. RADARIZE has the ambitious goal to enable seamless navigation in low visibility, specifically by using radar sensing where other sensors fail. Crucially, vehicles must be able both to accurately localise and to detect people. Building on leading expertise in the consortium, RADARIZE will innovate in terms of precise radar-based localisation and mapping algorithms, multimodal human detection including 4D radar, and radar performance specifically improved for confined underground spaces. We include key partners from the whole development chain, from academic research and R&D companies via technology providers for mining to end users. Our results will lead to improved social sustainability in terms of greater fire safety, less exposure to dust and particles, and better people detection for increased operational safety; as well as more cost-efficient mining due to less waiting times. The consortium has excellent entry points to the market for exploitation of the project results.