Tracking bulk material inventories, such as aggregate, stone, gravel, and sand is a critical task for construction, mining, and quarry operations. However unlike most inventory tracking, bulk materials present unique challenges that make it difficult to obtain accurate, real-time information in a cost-effective way.
Due to the challenges involved with carefully monitoring sold bulk inventories or raw materials, businesses often rely on estimates. However, this can lead to planning and scheduling problems that can slow down work schedules and increase costs.
Most of these challenges fall into a few distinct categories.
Inaccuracies During Transit: Many of the ways bulk materials are tracked are too inaccurate to provide much benefit when compared to the work involved. While some methods such as load cells on conveyor belts can be extremely accurate, they only measure what’s moving in or out of the system.
Safety Issues: Safety is a top concern for any business, and this is especially true in construction and mining. Using workers to measure large stockpiles on job sites or in a quarry can present safety concerns and risks that most companies would rather avoid. This is an area where laser scanners have helped to keep surveyors out of harm's way while still being able to capture actionable data from 20 - 40 meters away and even beyond visual line of sight when operating autonomously.
Nexys uses a modular LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithm that can be operated by hand or mounted to an autonomous drone to capture accurate 3D models of nearly any environment. LiDAR works by bouncing lasers around an unknown environment to create a 3-dimensional representation of any physical structure, in this case, a quantity of bulk materials. These 3D renders are known as point clouds and are highly accurate to within millimeters, providing exact volumetric data for virtually any stockpile.
Nexys can also take this LiDAR and IMU information and use it to power an online SLAM algorithm enabling it to empower a DJI M350 to autonomously explore an unknown environment without requiring a pilot in the loop, prior map, or connected GPS. However, GPS/RTK can be used if you're planning to fly autonomously aboveground. Both for online SLAM and for offline post-processing for further map refinement and georeferencing.
There are other LiDAR-based tracking systems on the market, but many of these have drawbacks. To begin, many are stationary units and only cover a fixed area, such as inside a silo, and will need to be repositioned throughout quite frequently. This can work in some cases, but dynamic environments or construction sites are not suitable for stationary units and will make larger captures hard.
Platform modularity and unrivaled robotic autonomy make Nexys the most flexible solution for inventory tracking of bulk materials for construction and mining applications.
Large civil construction projects around the world use Nexys for daily autonomous LiDAR scans of the entire project area. A benefit of this approach is that a single scan can also be used for daily construction progress reports and inspections, sending updates to a shared BIM model with stakeholder access. With Nexys, many surveying and inventory tasks can be combined into a shared portal.
This saves considerable time over having to perform each surveying task separately. Project leaders and architects can check progress against their as-built documentation while construction leaders can monitor inventory and bulk stockpiles. A single pass with Nexys captures all the data your various teams need to stay on schedule and keep costs under control.
Mining and quarry sites generally have more consistency than construction sites, but they can still pose certain challenges that make inventory control difficult.
The Nexys modular design allows it to seamlessly move from autonomous outdoor operation to more confined indoor spaces when needed. If the indoor or outdoor spaces are GPS denied due to depth or structure specifics, Nexys can still operate and gather the same accurate data as when those signals are available.
Once processed, the data can be quickly imported into industry-standard CAD workflows including the Trimble Reality Platform or RealityWorks software. Your data is always completely shareable between teams and never locked in proprietary formats that can slow down decision-making.
Dome covering ore stockpile |
3D point cloud of dome and ore stockpile |