Advanced Navigation has launched Chimera Land to solve the challenge of maintaining precise vehicle positioning in deep, dark and unmapped GPS-denied underground mining environments. This new 3D laser velocity sensor (LVS) is specifically designed to remove navigation guesswork by using infrared lasers and the doppler effect to measure true 3D ground-relative velocity. When fused with an inertial navigation system (INS), it eliminates ‘drift’. Meanwhile, AdNav Intelligence software dynamically optimizes sensor inputs in real time.
Traditional navigation relies on GNSS signals, but in underground-mining production environments these disappear the moment a vehicle enters a portal or adit. To compensate, mines often install expensive fixed infrastructure such as Wi-Fi beacons or radio tags. But as mines move deeper and into more hostile geological frontiers, the cost of installing such infrastructure becomes prohibitive.
“Development areas in mining have long been held back by fragile external infrastructure and complex setups that struggle to keep pace with a moving mine face,” says Joe Vandecar, head of product at autonomous systems company Advanced Navigation. Chimera Land changes that, he says: “By providing a fully onboard, self-contained solution, we’ve eliminated the ‘positioning gap’. Even in the deepest, unmapped headings, we turn navigational guesswork into absolute operational certainty, ensuring that autonomous fleets keep moving without interruption.”
Advanced Navigation’s Chimera Land is engineered to maintain high-confidence estimation in total darkness, heavy dust and high-vibration mining environments. It allows for ‘infrastructure-lite’ operations across the value chain. For example, the autonomous haulage system (AHS) enables continuous high-speed tramming in development areas without the need for pre-surveyed beacons. Additionally, it offers high-precision machine guidance, providing the sub-decimetre velocity accuracy required for automated drill rig alignment and robotic scaling.
Real-time, sovereign localization supports dynamic fleet management by allowing for precise asset tracking and ore reconciliation, even in the deepest ‘dead zones’. Last but not least, high-fidelity 3D velocity data facilitates predictive collision avoidance, improving the ‘time-to-collision’ calculations for safety systems and reducing nuisance alarms.
When fused with an Advanced Navigation 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 specialized lasers to measure a vehicle’s ground-relative 3D velocity with high accuracy. By feeding this precise data into the vehicle’s INS, the sensor eliminates the inherent ‘drift’ that typically comes with a standalone INS.
This integration is made possible by the company’s proprietary software, AdNav Intelligence. Drawing on adaptive algorithms, the fusion engine dynamically weights the input from each sensor, adjusting reliance in real time based on their reliability scores, environmental conditions and operational context.
To prove its resilience, Chimera Land was demonstrated in Europe’s deepest underground mine – a 1.4km deep labyrinth – as part of BHP’s Deep Mining Call. When integrated with Advanced Navigation’s high-performance Boreas D90 INS, the solution delivered a final position error of 15.9m over a 22.9km transit, equating to a position accuracy of 99.9%. In a world where inertial sensors inherently ‘drift’ over time, Chimera Land actively reduced the drift rate to a mere 0.07% of distance travelled. Crucially, this performance was maintained without relying on any fixed positioning infrastructure, pre-existing maps or external aiding. The accuracy was validated across five separate runs, and the system consistently hit an accuracy of better than 0.1%.
“In underground-mining production environments, knowing exactly where a vehicle is located is mission-critical,” says Vandecar. “To keep human operators safe from hazardous conditions, assets must possess the ‘situational intelligence’ to make real-time decisions. Chimera Land provides the foundational certainty required for this evolution, ensuring absolute positioning integrity in the world’s most challenging environments. These results prove we’re one step closer to unlocking scalable underground autonomy.”
Advanced Navigation’s new 3D LVS pushes boundaries in underground mining | GIM International
