RFID in Underground-Mining Service Applications

Abstract
Industrial safety is one of the main aspects of industry specially mining industry. In the
mining industry safety is a very vital factor. To avoid loss of material and damaging of human
health, protection system as well as faithful communication system is necessary inside the
underground mines. To increase both safety and productivity in mines, a reliable communication
must be established between workers, moving in the mine, and a fixed base station. Inside mines,
the wired communication system is not so effective. In this paper we are going to monitor the
Mine parameters like abnormal gas, temperature and humidity to avoid the harmful gas or high
temperature attacking the Mine workers.

Existing System Proposed System

 Most of the mine accidents are due to  In our proposed system we are going to
unable to detect and warning hazardous monitor the hazardous gases,
gases leakage. The landslide also a temperature. The parameters are
major problem for mine workers. displayed.
 Nowadays the manual alert only exists  In abnormal conditions, for more
and it’s not an efficient way. convenience and for high alert, voice
 Inside the mine we can’t get GPS announcement is done. Also the data’s
location exactly. are transmitted wireless at a high speed
to the control section.
Drawbacks of existing system:  RFID technology is to find the current
location of the robot.
 Manual alert is not a safety process.
 Not able to detect land slide Advantages of proposed system:
 Not able to communicate wirelessly  Fast response
with ground section.  Wireless communication between mine
 No alert in the form of voice is given to and control section
the workers inside the mine.  Automatic voice alert
Working principle:

In this system, the basic parameters like temperature and hazardous methane gas are
going to be monitored and if any abnormality happen in any of the parameters means it will be
intimated in the form of voice within the mine and transmitted to the monitoring section via
Zigbee communication module from the monitoring robot. RFID tags placed every 10meters
inside the mine. Here a voice IC named APR9600 is used for intimating the abnormal status in
voice format. The robot movement control from the control section through the Zigbee wireless
medium. RFID reader is used to find the current location of the robot. The status of the system
displayed on LCD. Mining parameters continuously updated to the monitoring section with
current location of the robot through the Zigbee.
Block Diagram:
Mine section:
100

80

60 East

40 West
North
20

0
1st Qtr 2nd Qtr 3rd Qtr 4th Qtr
2.4GHZ

Temperature
PIC16F877A
Sensor Microcontroller

Gas Sensor Driver 2-Axis Robot

circuit

RFID Reader APR9600 Speaker

Voice IC

RFID Tag

LCD
Display
Monitoring section:

Power
Supply

UART
.Net

Hardware Requirements:

 2-Axis Robot
 PIC 16f877a Microcontroller
 Zigbee
 Temperature sensor
 Gas sensors
 Relay
 Max232
 LCD
 APR9600, Speaker
 PC
 RFID Reader

Software Requirements:

 MPLAB Compiler
 Embedded C
 .Net
Application:
 This robot is used in mining & gasoline for security and surveillance purpose.