“Robominers” to scope Europe for resources humans can’t reach

ROBOMINERS’ innovative approach combines the creation of a new mining ecosystem with novel ideas from other sectors, in particular with the inclusion of disruptive concepts from robotics.

The use of the robot miner will especially be relevant for mineral deposits that are small or difficult to access. This covers both abandoned, nowadays flooded mines, that are not accessible anymore for conventional mining techniques, or places that have formerly been explored but whose exploitation was considered as uneconomic due to the small size of the deposits or the difficulty to access them.

Within the project duration, the consortium aims more particularly at:

1. Constructing a fully functional modular robot miner prototype following a bio-inspired design, capable of operating, navigating and performing selective mining in a flooded underground environment;
2. Designing a mining ecosystem of expected future upstream/downstream raw materials processes via simulations, modelling and virtual prototyping;
3. Validating all key functions of the robot-miner to a Technology Readiness Level (TRL);
4. Using the prototypes to study and advance future research challenges concerning scalability, resilience, re-configurability, self-repair, collective behaviour, operation in harsh environments, selective mining, production methods as well as for the necessary converging technologies on an overall mining ecosystem level.

Led by the Centre for Automation and Robotics (CAR) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), ROBOMINERS will be implemented by a consortium of 14 partners from 11 European countries, that covers a wide range of actors and specialities, consisting of geo-scientific SMEs, academics covering both mining and robotics, non-governmental organizations, and governmental bodies.