Many of the new paradigms in mining' and notions of sustainable mining' have at their core the requirement for reliable, continuous centimetre-level positioning accuracy to enable increased automation of mining operations. The deployment of precision systems for navigating, controlling and monitoring machinery such as drills, dozers, draglines and shovels with real time position information increase their operational efficiency, and reduce the need for humans to be exposed to hazardous conditions. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the best known, and only currently fully operational, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) providing positioning capability anywhere in the globe, on a continuous 24/7 basis, with accuracies ranging from the dekametre-level to the subcentimetre-level depending on hardware and operational configuration. Despite this versatility, GNSS cannot satisfy the high accuracy positioning requirements for many applications in mine surveying, and mine machine guidance and control. The reason is that increasingly open cut mines are getting deeper, resulting in a reduction of the sky-view' necessary for GNSS systems to operate satisfactorily. Yet, to date there have been no viable alternatives to GNSS that can be deployed in mine environments that can meet the challenging requirements in open cut mines.Locata Corporation, a Canberra-based company, has invented a terrestrial high accuracy positioning system known as Locata' that can augment GNSS with extra terrestrial signals to permit cm-level positioning accuracy even when there are insufficient GNSS satellite signals for reliable positioning and navigation._x000D_
Locata relies on a network of synchronised ground-based transceivers that transmit positioning signals that can be tracked by suitably equipped user receivers. Hence Locata can be considered a new type of local constellation', able to provide high accuracy positioning coverage where GNSS fails. This paper introduces some of the technical aspects of this Australian technology and describes tests conducted by Leica Geosystems over the last few years at Newmont Boddington Gold in Western Australia. A recent news announcement by Leica Geosystems (12 January 2011) has confirmed that their new mine management system will have combined GNSS + Locata positioning capability - the first commercial product that integrates GNSS and Locata capabilities into a single high accuracy and high availability navigation device for open cut mine machine automation applications._x000D_
FORMAL CITATION:Rizos, C, Lilly, B, Robertson, C and Gambale, N, 2011. Open cut mine machinery automation - going beyond global navigation satellite system with locata, in Proceedings Second International Future Mining Conference 2011, pp 87-94 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).