The life and condition of a MT65 mine truck frame is to a large extent related to how the machine is used. Damage from different stress cycles in the frame are accumulated over time, and measurements throughout the life of the machine are needed to monitor the condition. This results in high demands on the durability of sensors used. To make a monitoring system cheap and robust enough for a mining application, a small number of robust sensors are preferred rather than a multitude of local sensors such as strain gauges. The main question to be answered is whether a low number of robust on-board sensors can give the required information to recreate stress signals at various locations of the frame. Also the choice of sensors among many different locations and kinds are considered. A final question is whether the data could also be used to estimate road condition. By using accelerometer, gyroscope and strain gauge data from field tests of an Atlas Copco MT65 mine truck, coherence and Lasso-regression were evaluated as means to select which signals to use. ARX-models for stress estimation were created using the same data. By simulating stress signals using the models, rain flow counting and damage accumulation calculations were performed. The results showed that a low number of on-board sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes could give enough information to recreate some of the stress signals measured. Together with a linear model, the estimated stress was accurate enough to evaluate the accumulated fatigue damage in a mining truck. The accumulated damage was also used to estimate the condition of the road on which the truck was traveling. To make a useful road monitoring system some more work is required, in particular regarding how vehicle speed influences damage accumulation.

The life and condition of a mine truck frame are related to how the machine is used. Damage from stress cycles is accumulated over time, and measurements throughout the life of the machine are needed to monitor the condition. This results in high demands on the durability of sensors, especially in a harsh mining application. To make a monitoring system cheap and robust, sensors already available on the vehicles are preferred rather than additional strain gauges. The main question in this work is whether the existing on-board sensors can give the required information to estimate stress signals and calculate accumulated damage of the frame. Model complexity requirements and sensors selection are also considered. A final question is whether the accumulated damage can be used for prognostics and to increase reliability. The investigation is performed using a large data set from two vehicles operating in real mine applications. Coherence analysis, ARX-models, and rain flow counting are techniques used. The results show that a low number of available on-board sensors like load cells, damper cylinder positions, and angle transducers can give enough information to recreate some of the stress signals measured. The models are also used to show significant differences in usage by different operators, and its effect on the accumulated damage.

The life of a vehicle is heavily influenced by how it is used, and usage information is critical to predict the future condition of the machine. In this work we present a method to categorize what task an earthmoving vehicle is performing, based on a data driven model and a single standalone accelerometer. By training a convolutional neural network using a couple of weeks of labeled data, we show that a three axis accelerometer is sufficient to correctly classify between 5 different classes with an accuracy over 96% for a balanced dataset with no manual feature generation. The results are also compared against some other machine learning techniques, showing that the convolutional neural network has the highest performance, although other techniques are not far behind. An important conclusion is that methods and ideas from the area of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) are applicable also for vehicles. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.

Poor road conditions in underground mine tunnels can lead to decreased production efficiency and increased wear on production vehicles. A prototype system for road condition monitoring is presented in this paper to counteract this. The system consists of three components i.e. localization, road monitoring, and scheduling. The localization of vehicles is performed using a Rao-Blackwellized extended particle filter, combining vehicle mounted sensors with signal strengths of WiFi access points. Two methods for road monitoring are described: a Kalman filter used together with a model of the vehicle suspension system, and a relative condition measure based on the power spectral density. Lastly, a method for taking automatic action on an ill-conditioned road segment is proposed in the form of a rescheduling algorithm. The scheduling algorithm is based on the large neighborhood search and is used to integrate road service activities in the short-term production schedule while minimizing introduced production disturbances. The system is demonstrated on experimental data collected in a Swedish underground mine.

This work presents a method for on-line condition monitoring of a hydraulic rock drill, though some of the findings can likely be applied in other applications. A fundamental difficulty for the rock drill application is discussed, namely the similarity between frequencies of internal standing waves and rock drill operation. This results in unpredictable pressure oscillations and superposition, which makes synchronization between measurement and model difficult. To overcome this, a data driven approach is proposed. The number and types of sensors are restricted due to harsh environmental conditions, and only operational data is available. Some faults are shown to be detectable using hand-crafted engineering features, with a direct physical connection to the fault of interest. Such features are easily interpreted and are shown to be robust against disturbances. Other faults are detected by classifying measured signals against a known reference. Dynamic Time Warping is shown to be an efficient way to measure similarity for cyclic signals with stochastic elements from disturbances, wave propagation and different durations, and also for cases with very small differences in measured pressure signals. Together, the two methods enables a step towards condition monitoring of a rock drill, robustly detecting very small changes in behaviour using a minimum amount of sensors. Copyright (C) 2021 The Authors.