Research on path self-learning and navigation for electric drive mining vehicles

To ensure autonomous underground mining vehicles moving smoothly underground, path generation and navigation for vehicles are essential. This paper comes up with a method to generate trajectory and navigate the vehicles with laser beams. To give vehicles planned path, a map of the working area is needed. With the assistance of an offline path planning software, operators can make or modify the path and transmit it to the base stations for guidance. After path generation and transmission, the system could start positioning and navigating mining vehicles. Navigation experiments which were performed with a base station and a mining vehicle in an indoor simulated roadway show the method can be applied to practical underground mining vehicles.