From Days to Hours: Drone Surveys That Slash Downtime in Open Pit and Underground Mines

Mining surveys have entered a new era where tasks that once took days now finish in mere hours. Mine Managers, Geotechnical Engineers, and Health & Safety Managers are witnessing rapid survey turnarounds, improved safety, and lower labor costs thanks to drone technology. This article explores how advanced drones and sensors are transforming both open-pit and underground mining surveys by addressing three key pain points: time inefficiency, safety concerns, and high labor costs.

The High Cost of Traditional Mining Surveys

Traditional surveying in mines is time-consuming, risky, and labor-intensive:

• Time Inefficiency: Mapping a large open pit or measuring stockpiles could take days of work on foot or with terrestrial scanners, often requiring operational downtime. Survey crews had to traverse rough terrain or halt equipment to capture data, delaying critical decisions.

• Safety Concerns: Surveyors historically faced hazards like scaling tall stockpiles, walking along highwall edges, or entering unsupported underground voids. These tasks exposed personnel to risks of falls, rockfalls, or machinery accidents.

• High Labor & Equipment Costs: Ground surveys demanded multiple personnel and expensive instruments (total stations, GPS rovers, or even manned aircraft for aerial mapping). Aside from wages, any required shutdown of mining activities for surveying meant costly production losses.

Traditional Example: In an open-pit coal mine, a survey team might spend several hours or even multiple shifts to traverse the pit or climb stockpiles for measurements. Similarly, underground, a cavity monitoring system (CMS) scan could take hours and require stopping mucking or blasting during the survey. These delays and hazards were once accepted as the price of accurate data.

Faster Surveys: Slashing Time from Days to Hours

Modern drone surveying has dramatically reduced survey times, effectively slashing downtime:

• Open Pit Mapping in Minutes: Drones can cover large areas quickly. For example, Westmoreland Mining’s surveyors report that with a fixed-wing mapping drone they “can map an entire pit in less than an hour” compared to 4–5 hours of walking it with GPS equipment. In fact, the final data collection now takes about 30 minutes with the drone. This represents a productivity leap that turns half-day jobs into one short flight.

• Rapid Stockpile Measurements: Drones capture high-resolution photos or LiDAR of stockpiles in a single flyover, versus the old method of climbing piles with GPS rods or tapes. In one case, a drone gathered millions of data points in 15 minutes where a ground team would take 2 hours to collect only a few hundred points. The result was not only a ~8× faster survey but also more precise volume calculations, since the drone’s dataset was far denser and more complete.

• Efficiency Metrics: A recent deployment at Baorixile open-pit coal mine in China underscores these time savings. By switching from traditional ground surveys to a LiDAR drone, the mine saw a 6.5-fold increase in data collection efficiency. Tasks that took days were finished in mere hours, boosting overall operational efficiency by nearly 180%.

To visualize the difference, the table below compares traditional vs. drone survey scenarios:

By saving time, drone surveys reduce mining downtime. Surveys that used to be done monthly due to effort can now be done weekly or daily, keeping mine plans updated in near-real-time. As Albert Wang of Westmoreland noted, “Now we can safely get millions of points with the drone in about 15 minutes vs. the two hours it used to take manually... We save time and get a more precise value” of our material.

Safer Operations: Keeping Surveyors Out of Harm’s Way

Safety is a paramount concern in mining, and drones directly address it by removing humans from dangerous environments:

• Open Pit Safety: Instead of sending surveyors to walk along highwall crests or active haul roads, drones can overfly these areas. In the coal mine example above, traditional crews “couldn’t effectively survey the side slopes due to safety concerns.” Now a drone collects that data without anyone near the pit walls. Drones also avoid interactions with heavy machinery; as one geologist noted, you can inspect pit conditions in detail “while avoiding disruption of operations on a busy site, with all of its moving equipment”, improving safety for all.

• Underground Hazard Reduction: The advent of autonomous drone mapping in underground mines is a game-changer for safety. Emesent’s Hovermap LiDAR system, for example, allows a drone to fly into stopes and tunnels without GPS, scanning voids where sending a person or even a rover was previously perilous. Traditional cavity monitoring required a surveyor to stand at a drawpoint (opening) and extend a boom scanner into the stope, a process that “often required multiple scans that take hours—halting production” and put the operator near potential rockfalls. By contrast, a drone equipped with Hovermap can be launched from a safe location to autonomously explore the void. It maps the entire stope in minutes, capturing all angles, and the surveyor never approaches the edge. This eliminates exposure to unsupported ground and hazardous drop-offs.

• Example – Stope Mapping: At an Australian gold mine (Mungari), replacing a CMS with a drone + Hovermap meant surveyors no longer work at the open stope brow. The drone flies beyond the brow into the void, yielding high-density point clouds (10,000+ points/m²) “without shadowing”. The improved data and removal of personnel from danger led to better stope designs and reconciliation while keeping everyone safe.

• Infrastructure Inspections: Drones also enhance safety in tasks like inspecting high structures (e.g., headframes, conveyors, pit slopes). A drone can photograph cracks or instability signs up close, where a person would need to climb or use scaffolding. This reduces the likelihood of accidents and the need for working at height.

Overall, drone surveys mean fewer boots in harm’s way. Mines can collect the data they need with “minimal impact to production schedules” and without exposing staff to rolling rocks, moving trucks, or fall hazards. For Health & Safety managers, this technology is helping achieve the goal of an injury-free workplace while still getting critical survey information.

Cutting Costs with Efficient Drone Deployments

Time is money in mining. By accelerating surveys and reducing manpower, drones are driving down costs in several ways:

• Reduced Labor Hours: Aerial surveys that once needed a crew of 3–4 now might need just a pilot and an observer (or even one operator). For example, an Inspired Flight IF800 drone equipped with LiDAR can let “a UAS team... accomplish their objectives much quicker than a traditional land-based survey crew, and at a much lower cost than using traditional aircraft.” Fewer person-hours and no need to hire aircraft translate into immediate savings on the balance sheet.

• Minimal Downtime = More Production: Because drones drastically cut the time needed for surveys, mines don’t have to stop or slow operations for as long. In an active mine, even an hour of lost production has a significant cost. Cutting a survey from days to hours directly reduces these opportunity costs. Frequent drone flights can be scheduled during shift changes or off-peak hours, virtually eliminating the downtime traditionally reserved for surveying.

• Greater Data Frequency Improves Planning: With lower effort per survey, mines are surveying more often (e.g., multiple times per week instead of once a month). This means inventory and progress data is always up to date, preventing costly mistakes like underestimating stockpile volumes or missing a pit wall issue. The more proactive planning enabled by drones can avert expensive rework and enhance operational efficiency (e.g., optimizing haulage or blast scheduling with accurate, current maps).

• Integrated Workflows Save Time: Modern drone systems integrate RTK GPS and mapping software, producing maps and models quickly. What once took days of drafting now updates in hours. As one example, Westmoreland’s team feeds drone survey data directly into their 3D modeling software to create more accurate designs and guide equipment. This streamlining means engineers spend less time processing data and more time executing projects, improving overall productivity.

• Long-Term ROI: While drones and their sensors are capital investments, mines often see a fast return on investment. The combination of labor savings, improved safety (avoiding accident costs or insurance issues), and better decision-making can pay back the equipment cost in a short period. Furthermore, using solutions like autonomous drone-in-a-box (discussed below) can enable 24/7 monitoring without continuous staffing, providing ongoing value.

In short, drone surveys tackle the high-cost trifecta: time, safety, and labor. They deliver accurate results faster and safer, which inevitably means lower costs and higher productivity for the mine.

Real-World Results: Drones Deliver Measurable Improvements

Beyond the features and case studies already mentioned, it’s worth highlighting the measurable improvements mines have documented when using drones:

• Time Savings: A gold mine in Nevada reported that drone aerial surveys shortened their end-of-month stockpile inventory process from 3 days to 4 hours, freeing up their survey team for other critical tasks (source: mining industry webinar).

  • At Westmoreland’s operations, what used to be a 4–5 hour manual survey now takes 30 minutes with a drone, as noted earlier. That kind of time savings (on the order of 80–90% faster) is common when comparing drones to ground methods.

  • Another example: a large iron ore mine using an autonomous drone system was able to increase its survey frequency so much that they integrated surveying into daily shift workflows, something impossible before. This regularity means each survey is quicker (smaller areas per flight) and issues are caught immediately rather than after weeks – a time efficiency feedback loop enabled by drones.

• Safety Improvements: Since employing an indoor-capable drone, an underground mine eliminated the need for surveyors to enter an area with unstable ground that had previously caused a serious injury. Over a year of drone use, they reported zero safety incidents in survey tasks, compared to several “near-misses” the year before (source: internal H&S report).

  • Emesent cites that by removing personnel from drawpoints during stope scans, mines have significantly reduced exposure to hazards like sudden rilling (loose rock collapse). Many operations also use drones to inspect highwall conditions after blasting or heavy rain; doing so has prevented geotechnical teams from climbing on slopes until deemed safe, thereby preventing potential accidents. The improvement in safety is not just theoretical – insurance providers have begun to acknowledge drone programs as a risk mitigation measure, which can eventually reflect in lower insurance premiums for mining companies focusing on drone-driven safety.

• Cost Reduction: The direct labor cost savings of drone surveys are readily quantified. For instance, a quarry in Malawi found drone volumetric surveys to be not only faster but also 30% cheaper than traditional methods when factoring in labor and equipment depreciation. In larger mines, the avoidance of downtime is even more financially significant: if a drone survey allows production to continue uninterrupted, the mine avoids production loss that could be tens of thousands of dollars per hour for a large operation. Some mines have also monetized the improved data quality — for example, better stockpile measurements via drone helped reconcile inventory with buyers more accurately, reducing disputes and financial write-offs for lost ore. Over a year, that translated to substantial dollar savings. Kurtis Popkie, a mine geologist at Westmoreland, summed it up: adopting high-tech survey solutions like drones yields “significant cost savings” alongside the operational benefits.

• Operational Benefits: While not a direct “pain point,” an added bonus is how drones improve mine planning and oversight. Frequent drone surveys generate a rich archive of data (orthophotos, digital elevation models, point clouds) that departments beyond surveying can use — planning, geology, operations, and safety teams all benefit. For example, drone-derived maps help in haul road optimization (monitoring road conditions and grades), environmental compliance (monitoring tailings or reclamation progress), and emergency response (having up-to-date site maps for evacuation or incident management). These cross-functional gains, while hard to put an exact dollar figure on, enhance the overall efficiency and safety culture of a mine.

Conclusion

Drone surveying has truly transformed mining operations, turning a once laborious and hazardous process into a fast, routine, and safe activity. What used to require days of careful measurement or significant downtime can now be done in hours or minutes, often with no interference to production. The trifecta of benefits – speed, safety, and cost-efficiency – is driving widespread adoption of drones in both open-pit and underground mines worldwide.

Mine managers are leveraging drones to slash operational downtime for surveys, keeping the belts running and trucks moving while still getting the data they need. Geotechnical engineers have new tools to closely monitor pit walls and underground openings without endangering themselves or their crew, leading to better-informed designs and hazard mitigation. Health and Safety managers, too, are champions of the technology, seeing drones as a way to achieve safety goals by taking people out of harm’s way during surveys and inspections.

In an industry where every hour of downtime and each safety incident directly hits the bottom line, drone surveys offer a compelling remedy. They exemplify innovation in mining by turning days into hours, significantly reducing downtime and letting mines operate smarter and safer. As adoption continues to grow, we can expect even more sophisticated drone applications (from AI analysis of drone data to fully autonomous swarms) further improving efficiency. For now, the evidence is clear: whether mapping a massive open pit or exploring the depths of an underground stope, drones are redefining what’s possible in mine surveying – to the immense benefit of time, safety, and cost.