Advanced Navigation Chimera Land 3D laser velocity sensor

Advanced Navigation has launched Chimera Land, a 3D laser velocity sensor (LVS) specifically designed to solve the primary challenge of maintaining precise vehicle positioning for underground mining in deep, dark and unmapped environments where GPS cannot reach.

In underground mining, knowing exactly where a vehicle is located is mission-critical. Traditional navigation relies on GPS signals, which disappear the moment a vehicle enters a portal or adit. To compensate, mines often install fixed infrastructure, such as Wi-Fi beacons or radio tags, which can be time-consuming and costly as they must be regularly maintained to keep up with the rapidly advancing mine face.

When fused with an Advanced Navigation inertial navigation system (INS), Chimera Land allows underground vehicles to maintain stable navigation over extended distances and time. Instead of needing to ‘ask’ an external beacon or satellite for its location, the sensor uses specialised lasers to measure a vehicle’s ground-relative 3D velocity with high accuracy. By feeding this data into the vehicle’s INS, the sensor eliminates the inherent drift that typically comes with standalone INS.

Chimera Land has been tested in what is said to be Europe’s deepest underground mine, a 1.4 km-deep mine operated by BHP. When integrated with Advanced Navigation’s Boreas D90 INS, the solution achieved a position accuracy of 99.9% of distance travelled, the company said. Crucially, this performance was maintained without relying on any fixed positioning infrastructure, pre-existing maps or external aiding.