Project context
For years past, the industrial focus has shifted to lie upon the later stages of exploration with declining amounts of junior and greenfield project spending. Whilst the balance sheets of top mining organizations worldwide have remained rock solid amidst on-going pandemic, the sector have at large reduced its overall exploration budget efficiency year-to-year by 16,54%. To this, the investing cash flows are expected to be reduced by 20% as operations around the world have both been partially as well as completely stopped for a period of time. Where, as example, 82% of the global iron ore production have seen disruptions as of late 2020. The differentiating factor for exploration companies is found in the utilization of technology as automation of processes across the industry continue to gain momentum, whereas the activities concerning exploration will need to both expand and become more efficient in order to keep up with the ever-changing global trends.
Representing 2% of the industry operations budget cost base, the exploration activities carried out across the mining sector had their budgets increased by 15% in 2018. Yet, the level of exploration activities conducted is still deemed to remain at low levels and will impact the pipeline of development projects which may end up a costly ordeal for companies facing depleting ore deposits. The decision-making processes are today far from fully digitalized where the collection and analysis of geological data is highly reliant upon individual geologists. Further and more important, is the current separation between the work carried out in the field and the work conducted in the office which prohibits data from quickly being utilized and modelling being isolated, time-consuming and static rather than dynamic.
The FARMIN solution enables the geologist to work with complex 3D geological models anywhere, anytime, on any device, through the utilization of an augmented reality environment.
Overall objective
The objective of FARMIN is to develop a non-invasive product-solution suite combining AR and 3D geological modelling, to be validated and optimized. Industry experts will be able to interact with their environment online, to produce consistent and updated datasets for reliable interpretation of geological constraints for mining operations and exploration targets. GemPy will be integrated as a service into the rexOS platform supported by Robotic Eyes, whereas a link is to be established between planned applications and the back-end for geomodelling. Thus, allowing the user to visualize and interact with the data and models.
Planned key features
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Augmented real-time visualization and interaction
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Cloud-based cross-platform collaborative use and communication of geological models and 3D data
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Fully integrated geological modeling capabilities.
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Model verification in the field
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Version control with multi-hypothesis modeling
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Probabilistic machine learning