Design and manufacturing of a terrain robot for mining assistance and data acquisition

Journal of Science and Technology, Vol. 47, 2020 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING 
ASSISTANCE AND DATA ACQUISITION 
TRAN HUU TOAN 
 Faculty of Electronic Technology, Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
 tranhuutoan@iuh.edu.vn 
Abstract. The robot assistance in human’s activities of resource developing has been brought 
efficient applications, especially in the condition of severe and harmful environment. Inspired by 
the difficulties behind the above specification requirements as well as realizing the importance and 
applicable capacity of this field, our paper presents the development of a terrain robot for mining 
support and data collection. The robot has been designed through the analysis of kinematic and 
dynamic properties of the terrain robot. Based on the requirements of the robot’s power and the 
load support, the solution of mechanism, actuator for the robot have been drawn. As a contribution 
to terrain robotic field, we present an original prototype of Mining Assistance Terrain Robot 
(MATRob). During development of the MATRob, a basically control design has been developed 
to increase the ability of integration, and ensure real-time control performance besides a custom-
built control panel for users. The robot’s efficiency has been evaluated through several simulation 
training tests on obstacle overcome, material determination, picture /video captures and data 
collection. 
Keywords: Mobile Robot; Terrain Robot; Mining technology; Remote control; Human-robot interaction. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
Vietnam has relatively abundant and diverse mineral resources, including fuel mineral groups such 
as petroleum and coal; group of iron minerals and iron alloys such as iron, chromite and titanium; 
group of non-ferrous metal minerals such as bauxite, tin, copper, lead-zinc and antimony [1]. 
However, one of the issues raised is the effectiveness of underground mining due to the harsh 
environment. The underground atmosphere is often very hot and lack of oxygen, lack of 
ventilation. There are many toxic gases such as methane, coal dust, noise, can cause many 
dangerous diseases in this atmosphere. Moreover, the mining environment has areas that are 
difficult to access to maintain and supervise the operational system of the mine. When an accident 
occurs, rescue assistances are difficult and not timely [2]. According to the 2014 World Disaster 
Report of the International Red Cross - Red Crescent Society, from 2004 to 2013, 1,059,072 
persons in the world were lost in 6,525 disasters, and it cost 1,700 billion USD. In the past 20 
years, Vietnam's coal industry also has faced many accidents caused by methane explosion. For 
example, a methane explosion at Mao Khe Coal Company in 1999 or a serious accident caused by 
a water pocket at the Mong Duong coal mine in 2006 or an explosion at Khe Cham Coal Company 
in 2008, etc. [3]. 
Together with the development of science and technology, robots have being applied in all 
areas of life and society, bringing many significant changes to the economy. For example robotic 
mowers, vacuum cleaners in households; underwater robots in the deep sea; unmanned aircraft 
and space robots in space [4, 5, 6]; and many others. Moreover, mobile robots are increasingly 
investigated and developed for many purposes such as: detecting military mines, inspecting and 
welding underground pipelines, mobile robot operating in high radioactive environments [7]. In 
4 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
the harsh and dangerous mining environment, assistance devices have to be inspected and 
supervised at any instant in order to make effective and timely decisions. In order to perform these 
tasks, these devices must be able to move through the complex terrain of the mine, to observe 
images and information from the working environment such as air quality, water quality, and 
detailed 3D scans. These works help to supervise the status before mining, to establish the 
document of current mining status, as well as to update mining progress. The assistance from the 
devices clearly reduces mining costs and improve safety in mining process [8]. In the case of 
disasters, these devices can assist to find the victim and report timely. Moreover, for abandoned 
or fully exploited mines that human cannot access, in order to re-evaluate the environmental 
situation or to map at these mines, the use of the above devices is very necessary, especially mobile 
robots. 
Figure 1. The structure of the MATRob wheel drive system 
1: Powered sprocket wheel; 2: Idle wheel; 3: Track roller; 4: Driving belt; 5: Mechanism to increase the contact 
between the belt and road surface; 6: Self-adaptive bar 
This paper proposes the design and manufacturing of a terrain robot for  ... the robot fundamentally act on the self-
adaptive bar as shown in Figure 3a. According to the design requirement, the robot weight is P = 
200N (i.e. load 20kg). This weight is distributed on 10 self-adaptive bars of the two driving belts. 
At the same time, the self-adaptive bars are also affected by the reaction forces generated by the 
actuator’s thrust forces. The robot is designed to cross the terrain so that the bearing status of the 
robot is always varied. It is difficult to determine on which state these bars undergoes the largest 
force. Hence, the bearing capacity analysis for one of the bars is taken on the maximum gravity 
and thrust force of the robot. By this way, the dynamic analysis and the force diagram of the self-
adaptive bar are shown in Figure 3b. 
(a) (b) 
Figure 3. (a) Force diagram of the self-adaptive bar; (b) Finite analysis result on the self-adaptive bar 
2.2 Control design 
MATRob is a remote-control mobile robot system, the design of control system needs to meet 
special criteria such as: 
6 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
• Safety mode in power supply and safety interrupt in breakdown 
• Real-time response to accurately communicate with operator’s control 
• Ability to collect data and evaluate the results of simulated situations 
• Usability of the control panel 
In addition to the above criteria, the requirements related to technology updates to put the 
robot into market such as: embedded system, HMI system, CPU data processing, data store and 
transfer from simulated situations ... are also considered for MATRob but not optimal. From these 
considerations, the controller hardware diagram was designed as shown in Figure 4. 
DC 
MOTOR1
DC 
MOTOR2
DRIVER1
DRIVER2
Slave 
MicroController
Master 
Microcontroller
ENCODER 2
ENCODER 1
Data collection
STEP 
MOTOR1
DRIVER3
STEP 
MOTOR2
DRIVER4
HITU
MATRob CONTROL PANEL
REMOTE DATA
Figure 4. The MATRob’s designed control hardware diagram. 
3 EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS 
From the above design and manufacturing, MATRob is put into practice to test compared to 
initial aimed goals, simulated situations, and the performance response. The MATRob 
specifications were summarized as shown in Table 1 
Table 1. The MATRob specifications after design, manufacturing, and testing. In the table, the 
data are obtained from design drawings and experimental measurements. 
MATRob specifications 
Parameters Property, value (unit) 
Degree of freedom 4 (DOFs) 
Actuated degree of freedom 2/4 (DOFs) 
Weight 18.25 (kg) 
Total weight (included load) 40.0 (kg) 
 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 7 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
Overall size (length x width x height) 655x460x385 (mm) 
Maximum velocity 1.2 (m/s) 
Belt length 1420 (mm) 
Crane mechanism’s length 100 (mm) 
Terrain slope 45 (°) 
Remote control range 200 (m) 
Camera 600TTVL (color) 
Material Steel – Polymer 
DC motor power 120 (W) 
Maximum frequency (at the sprocket wheel) 1 Hz 
Maximum carrying load 20 (kg) 
3.1 Evaluation on trajectory tracking 
Preliminary experiments have been conducted using MATRob to perform manual exercises 
at different operating speeds (slow, medium, fast). The operator performed maneuvers to control 
MATRob according to a defined manual. A certain number of experiments have been conducted 
(8 times) and 4 random ones of them have been recorded. The motion eccentricity were collected 
to draw the movement accuracy of MATRob. As an example, Table 2 shows the specific 
eccentricity results that collect the MATRob's process of supporting users to move into the 
workspace and to collect information. In addition, while performing the exercises according to the 
operator's random request, the traveled data of distance and velocity can be observed to compare 
and evaluate the robot's ability of accurate motion as exampled in Figure 5. 
Table 2. Experimental results of control MATRob to move straight on different trials at various velocities 
No. Experiment 
Traveled 
disstance (m) 
Velocity 
Eccentricity on 
the first trail 
(mm) 
Eccentricity on 
the second trail 
(mm) 
1 Experiment 1 50 
Slow 53 52 
Medium 58 61 
Fast 74 68 
2 Experiment 2 100 
Slow 51 53 
Medium 55 63 
Fast 67 67 
3 Experiment 3 50 
Slow 55 55 
Medium 63 65 
Fast 70 64 
4 Experiment 4 100 
Slow 51 56 
Medium 64 72 
Fast 71 63 
8 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
At the next stage, MATRob has been conducted to track different trajectories at various 
operating velocities. The operator control MATRob by selecting the trajectory mode of an 
automatic switch. For simplicity, the chosen trajectories are a rectangle of 10 m x 5 m and a circle 
of 5 m in diameter. Figure 6 shows the specific results that capture the snapshot results from the 
video depicting the MatRob’s rectangular movement. In these experiments, the tracking 
trajectories of the robot was updated by the encoder and the velocities were chosen in advance. 
Figure 5. The traveled data of distance (m) and velocity (10-1m/s) in an experiment of control MATRob to 
move straight (the data of the measured velocity were not smoothed or filtered) 
Figure 6. Snapshot collected from the process of MATRob’s rectangular movement 
The control results show that, for a given trajectory programmed in the salve microcontroller, 
MATRob tracked the trajectories accuracy with a permissible error (the tracking error does not 
exceed 100mm). Similar to the rectangular trajectory, Figure 7 shows the specific results that 
capture the snapshot results from the video depicting the MatRob’s circular movement. 
Figure 7. Snapshot collected from the process of MATRob’s circular movement. 
 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 9 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
3.2 Evaluation on terrain ability 
In order to test the automatic function and to confirm the stable operation of MATRob, we 
have conducted simulated scenarios in which robot operated in difficult conditions such as grass 
dust, obstacle, steep hills. Operation data on the landscape in the mining environment were 
collected on the control screen and handle. 
Figure 8. Snapshot collected from the process of MATRob’s movement on the slope surface of 30 degree 
As a demonstration of disturbance adaptive ability, experimental results in the above 
conditions are shown in Figures 8 and 9. Through many experiments and similarly obtained results, 
MATRob operated well and overcame obstacles in simulated situations with small position errors. 
This ensures that MATRob operates accurately and meets the primary design objectives. Similar 
to the experiments in flat conditions, MATRob's support in the conditions of moving through 
rough surfaces, gravel, or slopes were considered (Figure 10). MATRob's operation results showed 
a great support for the operator in situations where the robot alternate with the operator to work in 
the difficult environment conditions 
Figure 9. Snapshot collected from the process of MATRob’s movement on the rough surface and obstacles 
Figure 10. Snapshot collected from the process of MATRob’s movement on the slope surface of 90 degree 
3.3 Evaluation on data collection for mining assistance 
After conducting trajectory tracking and terrain experiments, MATRob has been conducted 
to approach and identify different objects in the mine. It is assumed that there are four types of the 
10 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
material resource to identify as follows: Coal (subscripted by S1); Metal (copper, aluminum, iron) 
(subscripted by S2); Magnetic (magnet) (subscripted by S3); Plastic/carton (subscripted by S4); as 
shown in Figure 11. 
Figure 11. Material resources have been stimulated to identify by MATRob 
Experiment Identified results on the LCD screen 
Figure 12. The simulated experiments to identify the metal object 
The simulated situation is that the operator control MATRob follow a favorable direction and 
overcomes obstructed terrains. After that MATRob is controlled to detect one of the above 
simulated resources. The detected results of the material are collected by the master 
microcontroller which then sends the data to the slave one displayed on the LCD screen. These 
experiments proved MATRob's ability to assist in material detection of each simulated situation. 
Figure 12 shows the specific results collected from MATRob's operation in the data collection of 
mining support. 
4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS 
The results of the verification of operation modes through repeated experiments have 
demonstrated that MATRob can operate stably and safely and can assist its operator in the 
situations when moved in difficult terrain and identified the simulated objects of the mining 
 DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING OF A TERRAIN ROBOT FOR MINING ASSISTANCE 11 
 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
environment. Through the obtained results, the operator basically received the collected data and 
the moved direction from MATRob. In the normal terrain control mode, the results in 100% 
percentage of situations when MATRob was remote-controlled in the accuracy position and speed. 
Meanwhile, this percentage decreases gradually when the speed of the robot is increased and the 
terrain is more slope and complex. 
These changes demonstrates the manufacturing errors, control errors, and friction sufficiently 
affected MATRob when moving at high frequency or on complex trajectories which are out of 
design. Similarly, the experimental results when MATRob operated difficult conditions such as 
the rough surface and terrain obstacles as presented above have been summarized in order to 
extract operation guidelines that assure a stable implementation of the control system. Similarly, 
we have the result of a general comparison when operating MATRob with steep terrain and bushes, 
gravel. In general, the MATRob system has operated stably with relatively high reliability. 
However, these results only partially meet the requirements of the simulated situations, hence 
the limitations of the MATrob’s design and manufacturing have been drawn after conducting the 
experiments. The motion range as well as the simulated situations of MATRob have not met all 
the actual situations in the mining environment, thus it is limited to apply MATRob for the 
environments with many more uncertain factors. The control panel is incomplete due to hardware 
limitations in data collection of the central microcontroller. In addition, the performed experiments 
are not sufficient and the number of the simulated situations for mining is not high. Hence the 
assessment database on the ability of the robot to trajectory tracking, terrain overcoming, and 
materials identification is herein not rich enough information. In the case of encountering large 
obstacles or being out of motion range, the mechanisms of MATRob are not flexible enough to 
overcome. 
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 AND DATA ACQUISITION 
© 2020 Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City 
[9] L. Bruzzone and G. Quaglia. Locomotion systerms for ground mobie robots in unstructured environments. 
University of Genoa, Italy, 2012 
THIẾT KẾ, CHẾ TẠO ROBOT VƯỢT ĐỊA HÌNH HỖ TRỢ KHAI THÁC 
KHOÁNG SẢN VÀ THU THẬP DỮ LIỆU 
TRẦN HỮU TOÀN 
 Khoa Công Nghệ Điện Tử, trường Đại Học Công Nghiệp Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh 
tranhuutoan@iuh.edu.vn 
Tóm tắt. Sự hỗ trợ từ Robot vào các hoạt động khai thác của con người đã và đang mang lại nhiều ứng 
dụng hiệu quả, đặc biệt trong những điều kiện môi trường khắc nghiệt, độc hại. Nhận thức được tầm quan 
trọng, những thách thức về học thuật cũng như xu hướng phát triển của các loại robot vượt địa hình, bài 
báo này trình bày việc nghiên cứu, thiết kế và chế tạo một mẫu robot vượt địa hình hỗ trợ dò tìm khoáng 
sản và thu thập dữ liệu. Những nghiên cứu ban đầu về đặc tính động học của các loại robot di động giúp 
cho chúng tôi có những cơ sở để phân tích đặc điểm và xác định các yêu cầu thiết kế. Dựa vào những yêu 
cầu về mặt công suất và hỗ trợ tải, các phương án truyền động và các lựa chọn cơ cấu, nguồn truyền động 
được đưa ra, chúng tôi phát triển một nguyên mẫu của Robot địa hình có tên gọi là MATRob (Mining 
Assistance Terrain Robot) với các bản vẽ thiết kế, chế tạo và tiến hành gia công nguyên mẫu của Robot. 
Để MATRob làm việc và thao tác hỗ trợ thu thập dữ liệu trong khai thác khoáng sản, các thiết kế điều khiển 
và lập trình cho robot MATRob được thực hiện dựa trên nền tảng chế độ điều khiển thời gian thực, kèm 
theo một bảng điều khiển các chế độ làm việc và màn hình HMI cho người sử dụng. Robot được đánh giá 
về hiệu quả ứng dụng thông qua các thí nghiệm giả lập về vượt địa hình, xác định vật liệu, thu thập hình 
ảnh và dữ liệu về robot. 
Từ khóa. Robot di động; Robot địa hình; Khai thác khoáng sản; Điều khiển từ xa; Tương tác người-máy 
Ngày nhận bài: 02/03/2020 
Ngày chấp nhận đăng: 01/04/2020