Robust Localization for Underground Mining Vehicles: An Application in a Room and Pillar Mine.

Most autonomous navigation systems used in underground mining vehicles such as load-haul-dump (LHD) vehicles and trucks use 2D light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors and 2D representations/maps of the environment. In this article, we propose the use of 3D LIDARs and existing 3D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) jointly with 2D mapping methods to produce or update 2D grid maps of underground tunnels that may have significant elevation changes. Existing mapping methods that only use 2D LIDARs are shown to fail to produce accurate 2D grid maps of the environment.